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About The Book

No one disputes the fact that we live in a Digital Age. But unlike the transition into the Modern Age and the advent of various types of machines and technologies – transition that we could see and experience as different and alienating – the transition into the Digital Age has been more insidious. Where exactly do we locate it? And when did it even become the norm? Today, the world of algorithms is almost completely invisible to the common person, and yet is already everywhere. If there is no ‘outside’, how then do we assess the traditional relationship between the Human and the Technological? How do we understand our sense of Self. In this book, I argue that study of Being calls for a new type of science, the subject of which is algorithmic-ontology in which the human is being pushed to its corporeal / sensate / moral / physical / psychological /political / social / environmental / sexual / bacteriological/ global limits. In a way, we are now more Human than ever before and yet what we mean by Human is becoming increasingly illusive since the glue that holds all this together is a finely constructed type of hallucinogenic paranoia that speaks to us at different registers of reality. The major corporations, governments and hackers have to be seen as data addicted and the human as the object of this addiction. In this sense, the story is not about technology and capitalism, as about systems of dependency. In contrast to the outdated Three Laws of Robotics, I propose an alternative three laws as a way to describe the nature of this dependency. These laws are thermodynamic in nature since the algorithmic world is a heat-producing-seeking world that produces, captures and exploits the life pulse of data.

About The Book

No one disputes that we live in a Digital Age. But unlike the transition into the Modern Age and the advent of various types of machines and technologies – transition that we could see and experience as different and alienating – entering into the Digital Age has been more insidious. This book by MIT Professor Mark Jarzombek – historian and philosopher – opens a visual history that asks: How did we get where we are? A simple question, but not easy to answer since the world of algorithms is almost completely invisible to the common person, and yet is already everywhere, and as a result, we are no longer simple ‘humans.’ The book, – a companion to Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press) – looks at a wide range of advertisements, scientific papers, journals, political events and ransomware histories to produce a visual panorama interspersed with graphs and questions that allows for a more robust conversation about the digitally-modified, digitally-enhanced, digitally-polluted human.
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