Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Scorched Earth : Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World - Jonathan Crary

Scorched Earth

Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World

By: Jonathan Crary

Hardcover | 12 April 2022

At a Glance

Hardcover


$36.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $9.19 with

 or 

Ships in 10 to 15 business days

Refusing the world created by digital capitalism

Scorched Earth Tales aims a relentless spotlight on the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism. Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7, surveys not only intensifying economic immiseration, state violence, and environmental unraveling, but, equally important, the wrecking of long-standing forms of shared experience and social cohesion. The few remaining spaces of interdependence and mutual support are increasingly threatened by financialization, privatization and absorption into digital platforms.

Compounding this is the massive growth of technologies such as eye tracking, iris scanning, and face, voice and emotion recognition. At stake is not simply surveillance but the fate of what makes possible an interhuman life world: the voice, the face and the gaze. Capitalism now requires their capture and nonstop utilization online, weakening of one's capacity for caring or empathy. Refusing these imperatives is essential for holding on to a world in common and for the transition to post-capitalist ways of living together cooperatively.

About the Author

Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University and is a founding editor of Zone Books. His publications include Techniques of the Observer, Suspensions of Perception and 24/7.

More in Social Forecasting

New Beginnings : why change is so difficult and how to achieve it - Stefan Klein
Existential Hope : Facing Our Future When the Signs Look Bad - SJ Beard
Falter : Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? - Bill McKibben
Superintelligence : Paths, Dangers, Strategies - Nick Bostrom

RRP $32.95

$26.99

18%
OFF
Another Now : Dispatches from an Alternative Present - Yanis Varoufakis
A Liveable Future is Possible - Noam Chomsky

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
The Singularity is Nearer : When We Merge with AI - Ray Kurzweil

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
Homo Deus : A Brief History of Tomorrow - Yuval Noah Harari
Digital Degrowth : Radically Rethinking our Digital Futures - Neil Selwyn
As If Human : Ethics and Artificial Intelligence - Nigel Shadbolt

RRP $26.95

$22.99

15%
OFF
The Uninhabitable Earth : A Story of the Future - David Wallace-Wells

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
The Decadent Society : America Before and After the Pandemic - Ross Douthat