In The World Computer Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression-language, image, music, communication-into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.
Industry Reviews
"Tackling one of the most important issues in media and technology theory today-the intimate and ancient involvement between information and power-Jonathan Beller has written a bold book with intellectual originality, sociopolitical relevance, and evocative power." -- Alexander R. Galloway, author of * Laruelle: Against the Digital *
"In The World Computer, Jonathan Beller charts the lineage and lineaments of 'computational racial capital.' In the code-based mode of capitalist production now consolidating itself with hegemonic reach, the image replaces the commodity as the fundamental value form, and as it does the meaning of labor mutates. Racism, Beller argues, is not just an incidental effect of ambient bias contaminating this new machinery of extraction. It is written into its DNA. The World Computer is a passionate analysis of how the phase-shift of contemporary capitalism we are currently experiencing carries forward from its colonial past a coefficient of exploitation that intensifies apace with capital's exponentially increasing powers of abstraction. Beller's provocative genealogy of contemporary capitalism is an essential contribution to understanding the evolving economy as a formation of power, in symbiosis with systemic racism." -- Brian Massumi, author of * 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto *
"The World Computer has been published at an opportune moment, a moment that calls for further theoretical explanation of the social horrors that 'computational racial capital' mediates and produces. Its greatest strength lies in its provocative and synthetic reading of research across fields." -- Cengiz Salman * The Communication Review *
"A must read for those across multiple fields, including digital culture and sociology, software and media studies, as well as science and technology studies. . . . TheWorld Computer demonstrate[s] that digital technologies, algorithms, and AI cannot be deracialized without an undoing - and overcoming - of the social relations that they are part of." -- Josh Bowsher * Cultural Politics *
"A must read. . . wide ranging and historically far reaching. . . ." -- David H. Fleming * Film-Philosophy *
