Browse

Welcome to a brave new world of capitalism propelled by high tech, guarded by enterprising authority, and carried forward by millions of laborers. Gathered into mammoth factory complexes and terrified into obedience, these workers feed the world's addiction to iPhones and other commodities—a generation of iSlaves trapped in a global economic system that relies upon and studiously ignores their oppression. Focusing on the alliance between Apple and the notorious Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn, the book examines how corporations and governments everywhere collude to build systems of domination, exploitation, and alienation. The book's interviews, news analysis, and first-hand observation show the circumstances faced by Foxconn workers—circumstances with vivid parallels in the Atlantic slave trade. The book also shows how the fanatic consumption of digital media also creates compulsive free labor that constitutes a form of bondage for the user. The book draws inspiration from transborder activist groups and forms of grassroots resistance to make a passionate plea aimed at uniting—and liberating—the forgotten workers who make our twenty-first-century lives possible.

Contemporary discussion surrounding the role of the Internet in society is dominated by words like: internet freedom, surveillance, cybersecurity, Edward Snowden and, most prolifically, cyber war. Behind the rhetoric of cyber war is an on-going state-centered battle for control of information resources. This book conceptualizes this real cyber war as the utilization of digital networks for geopolitical purposes, including covert attacks against another state's electronic systems, but also, and more importantly, the variety of ways the internet is used to further a state's economic and military agendas. Moving beyond debates on the democratic value of new and emerging information technologies, the book focuses on political, economic, and geopolitical factors driving internet freedom policies, in particular the U.S. State Department's emerging doctrine in support of a universal freedom to connect. It argues that efforts to create a universal internet built upon Western legal, political, and social preferences is driven by economic and geopolitical motivations rather than the humanitarian and democratic ideals that typically accompany related policy discourse. In fact, the freedom-to-connect movement is intertwined with broader efforts to structure global society in ways that favor American and Western cultures, economies, and governments. The book reveals how internet policies and governance have emerged as critical sites of geopolitical contestation, with results certain to shape statecraft, diplomacy, and conflict in the twenty-first century.

This book examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements. It begins with the rise of the Zapatistas in the mid-1990s, and how aspects of the movement—network organizational structure, participatory democratic governance, and the use of communication tools as a binding agent—became essential parts of Indymedia and all Cyber Left organizations. From there the book charts the media-based think tanks and experiments that continued the Cyber Left's evolution through the Independent Media Center's birth around the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. After examining the historical antecedents and rise of the global Indymedia network, the book melds virtual and traditional ethnographic practice to explore the Cyber Left's cultural logic, mapping the social, spatial and communicative structure of the Indymedia network and detailing its operations on the local, national and global level. It also looks at the participatory democracy that governs global social movements and the ways the movement's twin ideologies, democracy and decentralization, have come into tension, and how what the book calls the switchboard of struggle conducts stories of shared struggle from the hyper-local and dispersed worldwide. As the book shows, understanding the intersection of Indymedia and the Global Social Justice Movement illuminates their foundational role in the Occupy struggle, Arab Spring uprising, and the other emergent movements that have in recent years re-energized radical politics.

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 shook the idea that advanced information and communications technology (ICT) is solely a source of economic rejuvenation and uplift, instead introducing the world to the once-unthinkable idea of a technological revolution wrapped inside an economic collapse. This book delves into the ways networked systems and ICTs have transformed global capitalism during the so-called Great Recession. It focuses on capitalism's crisis tendencies to confront the contradictory matrix of a technological revolution and economic stagnation making up the current political economy and demonstrates digital technology's central role in the global political economy. As the book shows, the forces at the core of capitalism—exploitation, commodification, and inequality—are ongoing and accelerating within the networked political economy.

The major purpose of this book is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind's oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet. Despite superficial differences, both technologies are radically alike in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes, not on “What?” but on “How do I get there?” In contrast to the fixed spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral tradition and the Internet mime the way we think by processing along pathways within a network. In both media it's pathways—not things—that matter. To illustrate these ideas, this volume is designed as a “morphing book:” a collection of linked nodes that can be read in innumerable different ways. Challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that they entail, this “brick-and-mortar” book exists as an extension of The Pathways Project: an open-access online suite of chapter-nodes, linked websites, and multimedia all dedicated to exploring and demonstrating the dynamic relationship between oral tradition and Internet technology.