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From Thick to Thin

Rob Lucas on Lorraine Daston, Rules. A historian of science tackles the thinning of ‘rules’: how paradigms to play with became regulations and algorithms to obey.

The Surveillance Business

Rob Lucas on Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Google and Facebook as pioneers of a troubling new regime of capitalist accumulation.

The Free Machine

Rob Lucas on Paul Mason, Postcapitalism. The present crisis interpreted as the stalled transition to a new mode of production, augured by info-tech’s ascent.

Socialism as a Regulative Idea?

In The Structure of World History, Kōjin Karatani attempts a radical reconstruction of historical materialism, from early nomadism to post-capitalist society. Mauss, Hobbes and Marx mobilized as companion thinkers of exchange; Kant as ethico-political prophet. Rob Lucas queries the speculative history of one of Japan’s leading public intellectuals.

Xanadu as Phalanstery

Rob Lucas on Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?. A utopian capitalist proposal to rewire the web and save the middle class.

The Critical Net Critic

Advances in information technology have generated both delirious boosterism and gloomy prognoses of computer-assisted decline. Rob Lucas engages with the sceptical current exemplified by Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, tracing its conceptual underpinnings and identifying its lacunae—political, economic, historical.

Dreaming in Code

The working life of a web developer, between the contending pressures of capital’s needs and the programmer’s craft ethic. What forms of solidarity are available within the horizons of ‘immaterial labour’?