The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital

More than fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that “the medium is the message,” profoundly influencing future generations of media theorists. A long-overdue wakeup call for the field of media studies, The Message is Murder analyzes the formations of violence still imbued in the everyday functions of the media. Jonathan Beller introduces the concept of computational capital to argue that contemporary media are not neutral, but rather they are technologies of political economy that became entangled with gendered and racialized capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Hitchcock, and Marx, Beller offers an ambitious and provocative critique of contemporary media studies. 
 

• If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (Oxford Studies in Digital Politics)
• Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
• The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture)
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
• Intelligence and Spirit
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Platform Capitalism (Theory Redux)
• The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)
• The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media