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The Smartness Mandate Kindle Edition

by Orit Halpern (Author), Robert Mitchell (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 3 ratings
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Over the last half century, "smartness"—the drive for ubiquitous computing—has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, economics, and the environment.

Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart homes. Smart cities. The imperative to make our world ever smarter in the face of increasingly complex challenges raises several questions: What is this "smartness mandate"? How has it emerged, and what does it say about our evolving way of understanding—and managing—reality? How have we come to see the planet and its denizens first and foremost as data-collecting instruments?

In The Smartness Mandate, Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell radically suggest that "smartness" is not primarily a technology, but rather an epistemology. Through this lens, they offer a critical exploration of the practices, technologies, and subjects that such an understanding relies upon—above all, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The authors approach these not simply as techniques for solving problems of calculations, but rather as modes of managing life (human and other) in terms of neo-Darwinian evolution, distributed intelligences, and "resilience," all of which have serious implications for society, politics, and the environment.

The smartness mandate constitutes a new form of planetary governance, and Halpern and Mitchell aim to map the logic of this seemingly inexorable and now naturalized demand to compute, to illuminate the genealogy of how we arrived here and to point to alternative imaginaries of the possibilities and potentials of smart technologies and infrastructures.
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  1. ISBN-13
    978-0262544511
  2. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  3. Publisher
    The MIT Press
  4. Publication date
    January 10, 2023
  5. Language
    English
  6. File size
    32759 KB
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“With precise focus and provocative paradoxes, The Smartness Mandate is written on behalf of the futures of planetary intelligence and how they might emerge from the present myopia.”
—Benjamin Bratton, University of California, San Diego
 
“In a critical synthesis as constructive as it is sharp, Halpern and Mitchell deftly historicize and surgically demystify the data-driven ‘smartness’ that governs today’s biopolitics, from options trading to ‘resilient’ cities. This book couldn’t be more timely.”
—Reinhold Martin, Columbia University and author of Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University
 
“If you think digital technologies are ‘smart,’ think again. This book delves into the material underworlds and logics of smartness, bringing its agencies, operations, and outcomes into relief. Richly evocative and political, the book delivers a vital planetary warning.”
—Lisa Parks, Distinguished Professor of Media Studies, University of California-Santa Barbara --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Orit Halpern, Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden, is the author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945.

Robert Mitchell is Chair and Professor of English, as well as Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, at Duke University. His books include, most recently, Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09W215N8H
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press (January 10, 2023)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 10, 2023
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 32759 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 325 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0262544512
  • Customer Reviews:
    5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 3 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Orit Halpern

    Orit Halpern

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    Orit Halpern is a historian of science and a media studies scholar. Her work focuses on how new technologies impact society and how media infrastructures produce worlds. She has written extensively about cybernetics, architecture and design, artificial intelligence, finance, and big data. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of automation, intelligence, and freedom; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. Her first book Beautiful Date: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and politics. She also directs two design history and practice research platforms Governing Through Design and Against Catastrophe.

    She is the Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Social Change at TU Dresden.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Robert Mitchell

    Robert Mitchell

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Robert Mitchell's research focuses on relationships between literature and the sciences in the Romantic era, as well as contemporary intersections among information technologies, genetics, and commerce, especially as these have been played out in the legal, literary, and artistic spheres. His most recent work has focused on the theory and practices of experimentation in both the arts and sciences, the history of vitalism, and the relationship between aesthetics and biological concepts of population. He has published two monographs--Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (Routledge, 2007) and Bioart and the Vitality of Media (University of Washington Press, 2010)--and is co-author of the monograph Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 2006) and the DVD-ROM Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information (U of Pennsylvania P, 2008). He is also co-editor of several collections of essays, including Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003), Romanticism and Modernity (Routledge, 2011), and Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (Stanford UP, 2011), and co-editor of the book series "In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science" (University of Washington Press). His most recent monograph, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature, is forthcoming in 2013.

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