Critical Zones of Technopower and Global Political Ecology
Platforms, Pathologies, and Plunder
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:30th Sep '23
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This book explores technology and the global tech industry in relation to social, health, economic, and environmental relations and politics. Peter C. Little argues that the power and influence of electronics and Big Tech—from the proliferation of digital platforms to the expansion of global electronic waste streams—is a political-ecological problem that impacts communities and lives in both the Global North and South. From intense resource extraction, industrial pollution, and surging health and economic inequalities, to data-driven surveillance, platform economy proliferation and intrusion, and Silicon Valley corporate-power, Little argues that the political ecology of tech matters now more than ever. Based on a mixture of engagements with tech criticism, ethnographic case studies, and critical analysis and development of guiding concepts—ranging from technocapital to technoprecarious political ecology—the book exposes and interrogates the underlying toxicity, precarity, and planetary politics of global tech. Critical Zones of Technopower and Global Political Ecology also tracks justice struggles that confront technopower, including “just tech” forms of social action that further reinforce the importance of a global political ecology of technocapitalism in the digital age.
This book is a must-read to understand the ever-present and intensifying horrors of technocapitalism. -- Alexander A. Dunlap, University of Helsinki
The scourge of technocapitalism plays an outsized role in producing increased social precarity, global ecological harm, and pernicious threats to democracy. Peter Little persuasively communicates the urgency of this historic moment in which we find ourselves, and demonstrates how multiscalar analyses and actions can effectively support environmental health, just tech, and radical care. -- David N. Pellow, UC Santa Barbara
This compelling, powerful book addresses our time’s most pressing and complicated issues. Peter Little scrutinizes Big Tech, the electronic industry and the techno power hegemony that produces and continues reproducing techno and toxic colonies in desperate places. Employing rich ethnographic observations, political ecology analysis and succinct techno-capital critique, the book navigates, gathers, and connects critical and complex concerns of global techno-capitalism. A timely book about our overheating planet. -- Samwel Moses Ntapanta, Aarhus University
Through lively prose and an eclectic methodology, Critical Zones of Technopower brilliantly analyzes the interface of emergent digital platforms, viral pandemics, and old and new forms of material plunder. This book covers a vast range of topics, including Big Tech, robots and automation, Artificial Intelligence, the post-pandemic Digital Reset, the Green New Deal, the billionaire space race, Smart Cities, degrowth, e-waste, viral biomarkers, ocean-based fiber optics, semiconductor facilities, and surveillance technologies. Author Peter C. Little critically interrogates these topics through a sophisticated understanding of the rise and proliferation of new forms of authoritarianism, toxic waste, climate cataclysm, and the deepening inequality and precarity of our technocapitalist world. Articulating a prescient and biting political ecological critique of the planet’s most perilous tech-fueled obsessions and consequences, Critical Zones of Technopower serves as a clarion call for intellectuals and activists searching for more just socio-technological and environmental futures. -- Daniel Renfrew, West Virginia University; author of Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay
ISBN: 9781666901092
Dimensions: 240mm x 160mm x 20mm
Weight: 531g
258 pages