Books
The New Death
The New Death brings together scholars who are intrigued by today’s rapidly changing death practices and attitudes. New and different ways of treating the body and memorializing the dead are proliferating across global cities. Using ethnographic, historical, and media-based approaches, the contributors to this volume focus on new attitudes and practices around mortality and mourning—from the possibilities of digitally enhanced afterlives to industrialized “necro-waste,” the ethics of care, the meaning of secular rituals, and the political economy of death. Together, the chapters coalesce around the argument that there are two major currents running through the new death—reconfigurations of temporality and of intimacy. Pushing back against the folklorization endemic to anthropological studies of death practices and the whiteness of death studies as a field, the chapters strive to override divisions between the Global South and the Anglophone world, focusing instead on syncretization, globalization, and magic within the mundane.
Death Glitch
Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
ORDER from Yale University Press
Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism.
Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?
Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry
By The Capacitor Collective
First-hand accounts from the tech sector’s resurgent labor movement as artificial intelligence gains ground in every facet of our lives.
ORDER from Common Notions
As tech billionaires align with Trump, they are also launching a renewed assault on labor through artificial intelligence and alienating tactics. But for now, it still takes workers to make fortunes for the bosses, and collective action is again on the rise. The rank and file are now coming from precarious new “gig jobs” and drawing strength from a class of worker who does what computers still cannot. Previously thought to be “unorganizable,” these workers are part of a North American movement that is reaffirming faith in collective revolutionary action through new methods of organizing, new ways of association, and a new synthesis of traditional labor activities with original research.
To capture this growing class consciousness, the Capacitor Collective has conducted ten illuminating interviews with platform workers and organizers whose efforts align traditional motives with new tactics in a text that shakes up the worker inquiry tradition and imagines new ways to produce knowledge with and for the movement.