The New Flesh: Life and Death in the Data Economy

Seminar summary

From social media to so-called ‘AI’, from cyberpunk society to automated apartheid, The New Flesh asks and answers the same questions: What does it mean to live in an increasingly online world and what is it doing to us? The thesis is this: Data production has permeated everyday life, on platforms that addict the bored and enslave the dispossessed. Communication has taken on an accelerated viral character, life is rendered ever more as a profitable simulation of itself, and new fascisms arise to disseminate themselves through cyberspace and develop their imperial weaponry. The platform is a factory for producing content, and security technologies are increasingly being trained by human beings displaced and enclosed within digitalized plantations. When we can understand the interconnections between the internet and the empire, we can fight back. By fusing Marx and Engels with William Burroughs, Mark Fisher, and contemporary Queer Theory, Adam C. Jones takes cybernetic philosophy beyond hype and hyperbole, presenting a materialist politics of the psychological and economic relations that permeate cyberspace today.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar will take place online on Wednesday 23 October 2024 at 4pm.

We welcome you to join us in EBS.1.1 in the Essex Business School Building.

Unable to make it in person? This seminar will also be available to watch online.

It is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

Speaker bio

Adam C. Jones

Adam C. Jones is a philosopher from East London, UK whose work focuses on Insurrectionary Communist thought, cybernetics, and the ways in which systems of social control function today. For the past four years he has co-hosted the hit podcast Acid Horizon, with whom he wrote Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape.