Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Systems Ultra : Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World - Georgina Voss

Systems Ultra

Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World

By: Georgina Voss

Hardcover | 30 April 2024

At a Glance

Hardcover


RRP $34.99

$32.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.19 with

 or 

Ships in 5 to 7 business days

A TOOLBOX FOR COMPREHENDING -- AND CHANGING -- THE WORLD

Systems Ultra explores how we experience complex systems: the mesh of things, people, and ideas interacting to produce their own patterns and behaviours.

What does it mean when a car which runs on code drives dangerously? What does massmarket graphics software tell us about the workplace politics of architects? And, in these human-made systems, which phenomena are designed, and which are emergent? In a world of networked technologies, global supply chains, and supranational regulations, there are growing calls for a new kind of literacy around systems and their ramifications. At the same time, we are often told these systems are impossible to fully comprehend and are far beyond our control.

Drawing on field research and artistic practice around the industrial settings of ports, air traffic control, architectural software, payment platforms in adult entertainment, and car crash testing, Georgina Voss argues that complex systems can be approached as sites of revelation around scale, time, materiality, deviance, and breakages. With humour and guile, she tells the story of what 'systems' have come to mean, how they have been sold to us, and the real-world consequences of the power that flows through them.

Systems Ultra goes beyond narratives of technological exceptionalism to explore how we experience the complex systems which influence our lives, how to understand them more clearly, and, perhaps, how to change them.

More in Central Government Policies

The Strange Death of Europe : Immigration, Identity, Islam - Douglas Murray
The Long Heat : Climate Politics When It’s Too Late - Keira Lykourentzos
Gilded Rage : Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley - Jacob Silverman
Nature's Last Dance : Tales of wonder in an age of extinction - Natalie Kyriacou
The Tech Coup : How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley - Marietje Schaake
Brave New Wild : Can Technology Really Save the Planet? - Richard King
No Front Line : Australia's special forces at war in Afghanistan - Chris Masters
Capital in the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Piketty

RRP $43.95

$34.75

21%
OFF
Toxic : The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry - Richard Flanagan