The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital
by Jonathan Beller  (Author)

About the Author
Jonathan Beller is professor of humanities and media studies and director of the graduate program of media studies at Pratt Institute, in New York.

About this book
More than fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that “the medium is the message,” profoundly influencing future generations of media theorists. A long-overdue wakeup call for the field of media studies, The Message is Murder analyzes the formations of violence still imbued in the everyday functions of the media. Jonathan Beller introduces the concept of computational capital to argue that contemporary media are not neutral, but rather they are technologies of political economy that became entangled with gendered and racialized capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Hitchcock, and Marx, Beller offers an ambitious and provocative critique of contemporary media studies.

Brief contents
Introduction 1
PART I: INFORMATICS OF INSCRIPTION/INSCRIPTION OF INFORMATICS
1. Gramsci’s Press: Why We Game 19
2. A Message from Borges: The Informatic Labyrinth 32
3. Alan Turing’s Self-Defense: On Not Castrating the Machines 44
4. Shannon/Hitchcock: Another Method for the Letters 57
5. The Internet of Value, by Karl Marx: Information as Cosmically Distributed Alienation 76
PART II: PHOTO-GRAPHOLOGY, PSYCHOTIC CALCULUS, INFORMATIC LABOR
6. Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing with Light 99
7. Pathologistics of Attention 115
8. Prosthetics of Whiteness: Drone Psychosis 137
9. The Capital of Information: Fractal Fascism, Informatic Labor and M-I-M' 158
Appendix: From the Cinematic Mode of Production to Computational Capital: An Interview conducted by Ante Jeric and Diana Meheik for Kulturpunk 175
Notes 190
Index 203

Length: 224 pages
Publisher: Pluto Press; 2018 edition (December 15, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0745337309
ISBN-13: 978-0745337302