Justin Joque - Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism

Traces the revolution in statistics that gave rise to artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms refiguring contemporary capitalism. Our finances, politics, media, opportunities, information, shopping and knowledge production are mediated through algorithms and their statistical approaches to knowledge; increasingly, these methods form the organizational backbone of contemporary capitalism. Revolutionary Mathematics traces the revolution in statistics and probability that has quietly underwritten the explosion of machine learning, big data and predictive algorithms that now decide many aspects of our lives. Exploring shifts in the philosophical understanding of probability in the late twentieth century, Joque shows how this was not merely a technical change but a wholesale philosophical transformation in the production of knowledge and the extraction of value. This book provides a new and unique perspective on the dangers of allowing artificial intelligence and big data to manage society. It is essential reading for those who want to understand the underlying ideological and philosophical changes that have fueled the rise of algorithms and convinced so many to blindly trust their outputs, reshaping our current political and economic situation.

Corey Pein - Dawn of the Space Lords

Billionaires have big plans to expand their dominion

Meanwhile, American capitalism carved its own venturesome path into the final frontier. In November, a capsule made by SpaceX, the company owned by PayPal lottery winner and Tesla head Elon Musk, returned four astronauts to Earth from the ISS. But, as Tesla owners have come to expect, there was a problem with Musk’s design. A toilet seal broke, spilling pools of urine below the floorboards. Fortunately, the structure wasn’t compromised, but the snafu forced the crew to resort to diapers for twenty hours during descent, which the pilot called “suboptimal.”

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/dawn-of-the-space-lords-pein

Christine Delphy - Separate and Dominate. Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror

An examination of how mainstream feminism has been mobilized in support of racist measures

Feminist Christine Delphy co-founded the journal Nouvelles questions féministes with Simone de Beauvoir in the 1970s and became one of the most influential figures in French feminism. Today, Delphy remains a prominent and controversial feminist thinker, a rare public voice denouncing the racist motivations of the government’s 2011 ban of the Muslim veil. Castigating humanitarian liberals for demanding the cultural assimilation of the women they are purporting to “save,” Delphy shows how criminalizing Islam in the name of feminism is fundamentally paradoxical.

Separate and Dominate is Delphy’s manifesto, lambasting liberal hypocrisy and calling for a fluid understanding of political identity that does not place different political struggles in a false opposition. She dismantles the absurd claim that Afghanistan was invaded to save women, and that homosexuals and immigrants alike should reserve their self-expression for private settings. She calls for a true universalism that sacrifices no one at the expense of others. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, her arguments appear more prescient and pressing than ever.

Dominique Eddé - Edward Said. His Thought as a Novel

In this personal portrait of Edward Said written by a close friend, Dominique Eddé offers a fascinating and fresh presentation of his oeuvre from his earliest writings on Joseph Conrad to his most famous texts, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Eddé weaves together accounts of the genesis and content of Said’s work, his intellectual development, and her own reflections and personal recollections of their friendship, which began in 1979 and lasted until Said’s death in 2003. Throughout, she traces the connection between personal history and theoretical options, illuminating the evolution of Said’s thought. Both specialists of Said’s work and newcomers will find much to learn in this rich portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most important intellectuals.

Nathan Schneider - Governable Stacks against Digital Colonialism

Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Although acts of insurrection may attract more attention, one thing leaders and theorists of anticolonial resistance have stressed persistently is the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both a means and end of their movements. But the dominant platforms for online communities are not well-suited for durable self-governing. Resistance often relies on the same colonial firms it opposes. What would community-governed technologies look like? This paper introduces the concept of “governable stacks”, a framework for self-governing as resistance to digital colonialism.

https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/download/1281/1456

Batya Ungar-Sargon - Bad News: How Woke Media Undermines Democracy

Conversation between Batya Ungar-Sargon, Deputy Opinion Editor of Newsweek, and Ethan Katz, Professor of History, UC Berkeley, as they dive into complex and controversial issues raised by Ungar-Sargon’s new book about American journalism and its role in shaping race, class, religion, and culture in America. Seeking to hold both the Left and the Right accountable, Batya takes issue with the “woke” media and the ways it has led the American public astray.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YTf4JYfMuoI

Melinda Cooper - Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection

The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/family-capitalism-and-the-small-business-insurrection

Massimo Airoldi - Machine Habitus: Toward a Sociology of Algorithms

We commonly think of society as made of and by humans, but with the proliferation of machine learning and AI technologies, this is clearly no longer the case. Billions of automated systems tacitly contribute to the social construction of reality by drawing algorithmic distinctions between the visible and the invisible, the relevant and the irrelevant, the likely and the unlikely on and beyond platforms. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this book develops an original sociology of algorithms as social agents, actively participating in social life. Through a wide range of examples, Massimo Airoldi shows how society shapes algorithmic code, and how this culture in the code guides the practical behaviour of the code in the culture, shaping society in turn. The ‘machine habitus’ is the generative mechanism at work throughout myriads of feedback loops linking humans with artificial social agents, in the context of digital infrastructures and pre-digital social structures. Machine Habitus will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, media and cultural studies, science and technology studies and information technology, and to anyone interested in the growing role of algorithms and AI in our social and cultural life.

French Socialism Embraced Neoliberalism and Signed Its Death Warrant

An interview with Fabien Escalona

In the 1980s, François Mitterrand brought the French Socialists to power. A generation later, they’re in danger of extinction and they brought it upon themselves.

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/french-socalist-party-francois-mitterrand-collapse

Jason E. Smith - Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation. Reaktion Books, 2020. 160 pp.

Reviewed by Manu V. Mathew

Smith situates automation within capitalism and argues that it is impossible to effectively make use of automation for the betterment of all, even if one wishes so. There is no incentive for the capitalist system to automate if it doesn’t return profit. By the same token, what is automated in a capitalist system is only those sectors whose automation is beneficial for further profit. Consequently, while some sectors see very high levels of automation, others see inverse trend. This is because automation in one sector creates a labor force now evicted from that sector, acting as a huge reserve army to be called into other sectors. Since their numbers are large, and are designated as un-skilled in the new economy, their wages are kept at a minimal. This acts as a disincentive for the owners of the latter sector to automate since employing labor power is cheaper than replacing them with machines. And both these trends – of automation in one sector and lack of automation in another – are the results of the same structural dynamism of capitalism which measures wealth in terms of the value of labor power at a time when the capital-labor dialectic is in crisis.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19872_smart-machines-and-service-work-automation-in-an-age-of-stagnation-by-jason-e-smith-reviewed-by-manu-v-mathew/

К.ф.н. Антон Бархатков рассказывает об идеях советского историка, философа и антрополога Бориса Фёдоровича Поршнева (1905 – 1972), выдвинувшего оригинальную теорию антропогенеза и занимавшегося поисками снежного человека.

https://youtu.be/7qAtaNi835c

Рози Брайдотти - Постчеловек

Книга Рози Брайдотти «Постчеловек» — одновременно введение и важный вклад в текущие дискуссии о постчеловеческом. Цифровая «вторая жизнь», генномодифицированные продукты, бионические протезы, роботы и репродуктивные технологии все это привычные аспекты нашего глобализованного высокотехнологичного общества. Они размыли традиционное различие между человеком и его иным, обнажив ненатуралистическую структуру человеческого. Книгу Брайдотти «Постчеловек» открывает исследование того, как постгуманистический ход смещает традиционное гуманистическое единство субъекта. Вместо того чтобы рассматривать эту ситуацию как утрату когнитивного и морального самообладания, Брайдотти утверждает, что постчеловеческое помогает нам понять наши гибкие и множественные идентичности.

Nathan Schneider - Governable Stacks against Digital Colonialism

Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Although acts of insurrection may attract more attention, one thing leaders and theorists of anticolonial resistance have stressed persistently is the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both a means and end of their movements. But the dominant platforms for online communities are not well-suited for durable self-governing. Resistance often relies on the same colonial firms it opposes. What would community-governed technologies look like? This paper introduces the concept of “governable stacks”, a framework for self-governing as resistance to digital colonialism.

https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/download/1281/1456

Verity Burgmann  - Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Australia are better known for the stories told about them than for any document historical significance. Renowned for their audacity and hooliganism the 'Wobblies' were particularly notorious for their active opposition to World War I. This landmark book conveys the vitality and drama of Wobbly activity, and also assesses the impact of the IWW on Australian political and labour history. Drawing from an impressive range of sources, Verity Burgmann writes with vigour and passion about Wobbly culture, and describes their doctrines, methods and organisation. The book highlights the unique nature of the IWW in Australia, and traces Wobbly influence in much post-war activity. Now, with the widespread collapse of communism and the inadequacies of labour parties, the IWW, as an alternative form of revolutionary working-class politics, merits renewed investigation.