Digital Nihilism

Author : Luís Aguiar de Sousa,Paolo Stellino
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2022-07-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783110699210

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Violence and Nihilism by Luís Aguiar de Sousa,Paolo Stellino Pdf

Nihilism seems to be per definition linked to violence. Indeed, if the nihilist is a person who acknowledges no moral or religious authority, then what does stop him from committing any kind of crime? Dostoevsky precisely called attention to this danger: if there is no God and no immortality of the soul, then everything is permitted, even anthropophagy. Nietzsche, too, emphasised, although in different terms, the consequences deriving from the death of God and the collapse of Judeo-Christian morality. This context shaped the way in which philosophers, writers and artists thought about violence, in its different manifestations, during the 20th century. The goal of this interdisciplinary volume is to explore the various modern and contemporary configurations of the link between violence and nihilism as understood by philosophers and artists (in both literature and film).

Author : Ryan Night
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 62 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2019-11-09
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0999857517

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Digital Nihilism by Ryan Night Pdf

Do you feel lost? Going through life without meaning or purpose? Slaving away at a desk job... for what? Yearning for an answer to life's biggest questions: why am I here? Where do I belong? What should I do? Digital Nihilism provides the answers for the dreariness of the modern age, and the consuming anomie that so many currently experience. ---------------------------------------------------------- In this book, the philosophies of various forms of nihilism (passive & active nihilism, optimistic nihilism, existentialism, absurdism) are introduced and tied together with man's quest for meaning. This is the book that describes and introduces what you need to know to join in the Digital Nihilism movement, which is spreading rapidly across the internet. You will be introduced to the concepts of Digital & Spiritual Nihilism, including layman introductions to nihilism (Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus), Jungian psychology (Jung, Campbell), various forms of spirituality (Kabbalah, Buddhism, Hinduism). You will learn about the goals of Digital & Spiritual Nihilism -- deep space exploration, radical self-expression, breaking reality, autonomy over time and freedom of access. You will learn about the metaphysics and quantum physics that describe the future Digital Nihilism hopes to achieve. Finally, you will learn about the symbols commonly used by those associated with the Digital Nihilism movement.

Author : Geert Lovink
Publisher : Digital Barricades
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2019
Category : Melancholy
ISBN : 0745339344

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Sad by Design by Geert Lovink Pdf

We live in a time of engineered intimacy, toxic memes and online addiction. Can we ever break free?

Author : Andrew C. Wenaus
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2021-05-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781793614643

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The Literature of Exclusion by Andrew C. Wenaus Pdf

In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists protested against art, nationalism, the individual subject, and technologized war. With their automatic anti-art and cultural disruptiveness, Dadaists sought to “signify no thing.” Today, data also operates autonomously. However, rather than dismantling tradition, data organizes, selects, combines, quantifies, and simplifies the complexity of actuality. Like Dada, data also signifies nothing. While Dadaists protest with purpose, data proceeds without intention. The individual in the early twentieth century agonizes over the alienation from daily life and the fear of being converted into a cog in a machine. Today, however, the individual in twenty-first-century supermodernity merges, not with large industrial machinery, but with the processual and procedural logic of programming with innocuous ease. Both exclude human agency from self-narration but to differing degrees of abstraction. Examining the work of B.R. Yeager, Samuel Beckett, Jeff Noon, Kenji Siratori, Mike Bonsall, Allison Parrish, and narratives written by artificial intelligence, Wenaus considers the threshold of sensible narration and the effects that the shift from a culture of language to a culture of digital code has on lived experience. While data offers a closed system, Dadaist literature of exclusion, he suggests, promises a future of open, hyper-contingent, unprescribed alternatives for self-narration.

Author : Wendy Syfret
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2022-07-07
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1788167031

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The Sunny Nihilist by Wendy Syfret Pdf

Author : Nolen Gertz
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2019-09-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262537179

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Nihilism by Nolen Gertz Pdf

An examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters. When someone is labeled a nihilist, it's not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, “an ideology of nothing. “ Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that life is nothing? Or the belief that the beliefs we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learn to distinguish what is meaningful from what is meaningless. In this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western philosophy from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although the term “nihilism” was first used by Friedrich Jacobi to criticize the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Gertz shows that the concept can illuminate the thinking of Socrates, Descartes, and others. It is Nietzsche, however, who is most associated with nihilism, and Gertz focuses on Nietzsche's thought. Gertz goes on to consider what is not nihilism—pessimism, cynicism, and apathy—and why; he explores theories of nihilism, including those associated with Existentialism and Postmodernism; he considers nihilism as a way of understanding aspects of everyday life, calling on Adorno, Arendt, Marx, and prestige television, among other sources; and he reflects on the future of nihilism. We need to understand nihilism not only from an individual perspective, Gertz tells us, but also from a political one.

Author : Richard Seymour
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2020-09-22
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781788739313

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The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour Pdf

A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

Author : Geert Lovink
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2013-10-31
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9781135872151

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Zero Comments by Geert Lovink Pdf

In Zero Comments, internationally renowned media theorist and 'net critic' Geert Lovink revitalizes worn out concepts about the Internet and interrogates the latest hype surrounding blogs and social network sites. In this third volume of his studies into critical Internet culture, following the influential Dark Fiber and My First Recession, Lovink develops a 'general theory of blogging.' He unpacks the ways that blogs exhibit a 'nihilist impulse' to empty out established meaning structures. Blogs, Lovink argues, are bringing about the decay of traditional broadcast media, and they are driven by an in-crowd dynamic in which social ranking is a primary concern. The lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or 'zero comments'. Zero Comments also explores other important changes to Internet culture, as well, including the silent globalization of the Net in which the West is no longer the main influence behind new media culture, as countries like India, China and Brazil expand their influence and looks forward to speculate on the Net impact of organized networks, free cooperation and distributed aesthetics.

Author : Arthur Kroker
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 0802085733

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The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism by Arthur Kroker Pdf

In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, Arthur Kroker explores the future of the 21st century in the language of technological destiny. Presenting Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche as prophets of technological nihilism, Kroker argues that every aspect of contemporary culture, society, and politics is coded by the dynamic unfolding of the 'will to technology.' Moving between cultural history, our digital present, and the biotic future, Kroker theorizes on the relationship between human bodies and posthuman technology, and more specifically, wonders if the body of work offered by thinkers like Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche is a part of our past or a harbinger of our technological future. Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche intensify our understanding of the contemporary cultural climate. Heidegger's vision posits an increasingly technical society before which we have become 'objectless objects'? driftworks in a 'culture of boredom.' In Marx, the disciplining of capital itself by the will to technology is a code of globalization, first announced as streamed capitalism. Nietzsche mediates between them, envisioning in the gathering shadows of technological society the emergent signs of a culture of nihilism. Like Marx, he insists on thinking of the question of technology in terms of its material signs. In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, Kroker consistently enacts an invigorating and innovative vision, bringing together critical theory, art, and politics to reveal the philosophic apparatus of technoculture.

Author : Benjamin H. Bratton
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 523 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2016-02-19
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9780262029575

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The Stack by Benjamin H. Bratton Pdf

A comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack—an accidental megastructure—is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical architecture. What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image? In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention. The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds. thestack.org

Author : Ken Hillis,Susanna Paasonen,Michael Petit
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2015-02-27
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9780262028646

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Networked Affect by Ken Hillis,Susanna Paasonen,Michael Petit Pdf

Investigations of affective experiences that emerge in online settings that range from Facebook discussion forums to “smart” classrooms. Our encounters with websites, avatars, videos, mobile apps, discussion forums, GIFs, and nonhuman intelligent agents allow us to experience sensations of connectivity, interest, desire, and attachment—as well as detachment, boredom, fear, and shame. Some affective online encounters may arouse complex, contradictory feelings that resist dualistic distinctions. In this book, leading scholars examine the fluctuating and altering dynamics of affect that give shape to online connections and disconnections. Doing so, they tie issues of circulation and connectivity to theorizations of networked affect. Their diverse investigations—considering subjects that range from online sexual dynamics to the liveliness of computer code—demonstrate the value of affect theories for Internet studies. The contributors investigate networked affect in terms of intensity, sensation, and value. They explore online intensities that range from Tumblr practices in LGBTQ communities to visceral reactions to animated avatars; examine the affective materiality of software in such platforms as steampunk culture and nonprofit altporn; and analyze the ascription of value to online activities including the GTD (“getting things done”) movement and the accumulation of personal digital materials. Contributors James Ash, Alex Cho, Jodi Dean, Melissa Gregg, Ken Hillis, Kylie Jarrett, Tero Karppi, Stephen Maddison, Susanna Paasonen, Jussi Parikka, Michael Petit, Jennifer Pybus, Jenny Sundén, Veronika Tzankova

Author : Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2019-01-24
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780190853990

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The Digital Uncanny by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli Pdf

We are now confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as déjà vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today's uncanny refers to how non-human devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms, feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, thus intimating that we are but machines and that our behavior is predicable precisely because we are machinic. It adds another dimension to those feelings in which we question whether our responses are subjective or automated - automated as in reducing one's subjectivity to patterns of data and using those patterns to present objects or ideas that would then elicit one's genuinely subjective-yet effectively preset-response. In fact, this anticipation of our responses is a feedback loop that we humans have produced by designing software that can study our traces, inputs, and moves. In this sense one could say that the digital uncanny is a trick we play on ourselves, a trick that we would not be able to play had we not developed sophisticated digital technologies. Digital Uncanny explores how digital technologies, particularly software systems working through massive amounts of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to their anticipation. Through a close reading of interactive and experimental art works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Viola, Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine, this book is designed to explore how the digital uncanny unsettles and estranges concepts of "self," "affect," "feedback" and "aesthetic experience," forcing us to reflect on our relationship with computational media and by extension our relationship to each other and our experience of the world.

Author : Ben Ware
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2024-03-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781788739993

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On Extinction by Ben Ware Pdf

"This path-breaking book by one of the sharpest minds in contemporary philosophy will live on for a very long time." —Dany Nobus, author of Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason Philosophy at the end of the world On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face ‘the end of all things’, Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we should examine our current reality. Radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst but rather with beginning again at the end. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need. Combining lessons from Kant, Hegel, Adorno, and Lacan, as well as drawing on popular culture and ecology, Ware recasts the most urgent issue of our times and resolves that we can only consider our collective end by treating it as a starting point.

Author : Dan Mellamphy,Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Publisher : punctum books
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9780692270790

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The Digital Dionysus by Dan Mellamphy,Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Pdf

Can Nietzsche be considered a thinker of media and mediation, as the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler declared in his influential book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter?Nietzsche was a truly transdisciplinary thinker, one who never fit into his own nineteenth-century surroundings and who recognized himself as a "herald and precursor" of the future, of our globally-reticulated digital present. Perhaps not since Kittler has there been a study - let alone an anthology - that re-assesses and re-evaluates Nietzsche's thought in light of the technically mediated and machinic conditions of the human in the age of digital networks.Drawing on the first four years of conference-proceedings from the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western (NWW, Western University, Ontario), which culminated in the "New York NWW.IV": Cyber-Nietzsche: Tunnels, Tightropes, Net-&-Meshworks (held at the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design), The Digital Dionysus explores Nietzschean themes in light of the problems and questions of digitization, information and technical mediation, offering its readers the opportunity to consider Nietzsche's contemporary relevance in light of emerging theories in new media studies, political studies, critical aesthetics, the digital humanities and contemporary post-continental philosophy.Co-edited by Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Western University, UWO) for the CTM Documents Initiative imprint (Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, The New School), the volume features essays and works by leading and emerging philosophers, artists, [h]activists, and political media theorists, including Babette Babich, R. Scott Bakker, Shannon Bell, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Jen Boyle, Sarah Choukah, Manabrata Guha, Horst Hutter, Arthur Kroker, Nicola Masciandaro, Dan Mellamphy, Joseph Nechvatal, Julian Reid, Gary Shapiro, Heike Schotten, Eugene Thacker and Dylan Wittkower.

Author : Kamil Zeidler
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 430 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2024-07-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783031555213

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Aesthetics of Law by Kamil Zeidler Pdf