Cloud Time

by Dean Lockwood, Rob Coley

The ‘Cloud’, hailed as a new digital commons, a utopia of collaborative expression and constant connection, actually constitutes a strategy of vitalist post-hegemonic power, which moves to dominate immanently and intensively, organizing our affective political involvements, instituting new modes of enclosure, and, crucially, colonizing the future through a new temporality of control. The virtual is often claimed as a realm of invention through which capitalism might be cracked, but it is precisely here that power now thrives. Cloud time, in service of security and profit, assumes all is knowable. We bear witness to the collapse of both past and future virtuals into a present dedicated to the exploitation of the spectres of both.
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127 pages, Paperback

First published April 16, 2012

Reviews

[Franklin Ridgway]

This brief study makes a strong argument that what Sherry Turkle calls "life on the screen" is little more than proletarianized "free time." A counterpoint to Nick Dyer-Witheford's _Cyber-Marx_.

[Aaron Schuschu]

Zero Books can get pretty predictable at times.