Sociology Department at Lancaster University
a.fish2@lancaster.ac.uk
As an American who lives in the United Kingdom, I have witnessed the disturbing rise and empowerment of two nationalist populist movements, Brexit and Trump. The wounds of the first were still smarting when the debilitating blow of the second were felt. Can’t go home and don’t want to stay here, is how a lot […]
In the film Elysium, the ultra-rich have left an apocalyptic Earth ravaged by global warming and overpopulation. Their utopian colony orbits high above Earth which festers below. Science fiction, but Silicon Valley techno-utopians also dream of rising above the planet’s problems. The Seasteading Institute, for example, seeks to create floating cities far enough from land […]
“The business proposition of cloud companies is that their mirroring is an affordable way of securing retrievable data. The compromise is that mirroring liberates and at once captures the very images and information it displaces, diffracts, and makes autonomous… While the capture of mirrored data for surplus production should be clear, mirroring is also an […]
John Carter McKnight and Adam Fish This past weekend, two prominent socio-technical critics have given us radically different versions of the future of capitalism in the age of social media. Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, argues in an op-ed for FT for a dystopia of toothbrush analytics, trash bin […]
Alix Johnson, a PhD student in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, will be going to Iceland to study the practices and discourses of data centers. She studies information infrastructures in capitalist economies and postcolonial politics, and researches these questions in Iceland where they take strange and fascinating forms. Adam Fish: What makes Iceland important […]