Publisher's Synopsis
The Internet is no more. If it still exists, it does so only as a residual technology, still effective in the present but less intelligible as such. After nearly two decades and a couple of financial crises, it has become the almost imperceptible background of today's Corporate Mega Network (CMN)-a pervasive planetary technological infrastructure that meshes communication with computation. In the essays collected in this book, written mostly between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s, Tiziana Terranova bears witness to this monstrous transformation. Mobilising theories of cognitive capitalism, neo-monadology, and sympathetic cooperation, considering ideas such as the attention economy and its psychopathologies, and evoking the relation between algorithmic automation and the Common, she provides real-time takes on the mutations that have changed the technological, cultural, and economic ethos of the Internet. Mostly conceived, elaborated, and discussed in collective activist spaces, After the Internet is neither apocalyptic lamentation nor melancholic "rise and fall" story of betrayed great expectations. On the contrary, it looks within the folds of the recent past to unfold the potential futurities that the post-digital computational present still entails. Series Overview: Semiotext(e)'s Intervention Series offers polemical texts by intellectual agitators. Short, engaged, and highly focused manifestos, essays, and critiques, these palm-sized salvos address a variety of political and cultural topics but share a passion for provocation, and allow for more immediate excursions in Semiotext(e)'s ongoing mission of intellectual activism.
