Marc Steinberg and Joshua Neves' edited collection In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures 2024) is out now via open-access, part of the Institute of Network Cultures Theory on Demand series. The collection grows out of the 2021-2022 GEM Seminar in Media and Political Theory on the problem of In/Convenience. You can order a copy or download the book at www.networkcultures.org/publications.
About the book: Convenience is the feeling and aspiration that animates our platformed present. As such, it poses urgent techno-political questions about the everyday digital habitus. From next-day delivery, gig work, and tele-health to cashless payment systems, data centers, and policing convenience is an affordance and an enclosure; our logistical surround. Driving every experience of convenience is the precarious work, proprietary algorithms, or predatory schemes that subtend it. This collaborative book traces how the logistical surround is transformed by thickening digital economies and networked rituals, examining contemporary conveniences across a wide range of practices and geographies. Contributors examine the ineluctable relation between convenience and its constitutive opposite, inconvenience, considering its infrastructural, affective, and compulsory dimensions. Living in convenience is thus both a hyper visible manifestation of so-called late capitalism and a pervasive mood that fades into the background (like the data centers that power it). Bringing the agonistic relation of in/convenience to center stage, this volume analyzes the logistics of delivery, streaming porn, cloud computing, water infrastructures, smartness paradigms, convenience stores, sleep apps, surveillance, AI ethics, and much more – rethinking the cultural politics of convenience for the present conjuncture.
Table of Contents:
Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg
Introduction
Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg
In Convenience
Darren Byler
Convenient-for-the-People Policing, Protected Consumer-Citizens and Infrastructures of Disposability in Northwest China
Orit Halpern
The Resilient Situation: Adaptive Management, Finance, and Environment
Armin Beverungen
Collectivizing Convenience? From Delivery to Logisticality
Mél Hogan and Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
Clouded Conveniences
Tung-Hui Hu
Waiting for 'Day Zero'
Susanna Paasonen
Platform Economies, Reputational Stains, and the In/conveniences of Porn
Neta Alexander
Theorizing ‘Anti-Content’: On Sleep Apps and Horizontal Media
Rahul Mukherjee
In/Conveniences of Mobile Payments: “Alternative Data” and the Distribution Infrastructures of Loan Apps
Andrea Pollio and Liza Rose Cirolia
Beyond Inclusion: Glitchy Economies and the Promise of Platformization in African Cities
Tomasz Hollanek and Maya Indira Ganesh
Easy Wins and Low Hanging Fruit. Blueprints, Toolkits, and Playbooks to Advance Diversity and Inclusion in AI
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