Archive for 2017

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[ecrea] New Book: The Value System: The Internet and Radical Change in a Time of Crisis

Fri Oct 06 16:55:06 GMT 2017




Commlist members might be interested in my latest book, *The Value System: The Internet and Radical Change in a Time of Crisis*, published open access via the Creative Commons.

The complete text of The Value System is freely available as a PDF:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8-LXoAP8Kn0Vnp6Z3I5Y0lyNzQ

and in print via Amazon, and as an ebook on Kindle.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1775098508

The abstract and table of contents are below.

____________________________

Contents

Introduction

1. Thinking About Change

2. Capitalism’s Value System

3. The Central Problem with the Central Value System

4. Radical Change in the Wrong Direction

5. From Twitter to China: Radical Change in Authoritarian Environments

6. The Radicalization of Popular Culture

7. Radical Economic Change

8. A Theory of Mediated Radical Change

Conclusion

Bibliography

__________________________

Abstract

The audience is not the same as it once was in the 1900s. Our global context has also dramatically changed. Climate change is creating conditions of impending civilizational collapse, and hundreds of millions of Internet-enabled citizens have greatly expanded communicative freedoms and productive, distributive, and collective capabilities. How will these forces interact in a world defined by authoritarian governments, ineffective democracies, and crisis-ridden economies? In /The Value System/ Michael Strangelove explores phenomena as diverse as Ikea, global consumer culture, the Chinese Internet, environmental policy, biodiversity, amateur creativity, digital piracy, subversion, and resistance – all set in a context of a global value system that presents humanity with the options of unconstrained growth, mass extinction, or radical change.

Strangelove offers a critique of pessimistic Marxist theory and argues that our expanded communicative capabilities remain a significant countervailing force to dominant institutions and elite privilege. China and Twitter provide insight into how Internet audiences exist simultaneously within domains of high and low control. Through online conversation, subversive cultural production, and street-level activism, Chinese citizens demonstrate the limits to totalitarian control.

The ecological impact of the Internet is brought into the centre of media theory and social analysis. Climate change provides a global and authoritative measurement of capitalism’s value system and its consequences. Strangelove argues that the worst consequences of climate change can be resolved only if we correct the toxic character of capitalism’s value system and build new value systems out of the raw cultural material of cyberspace. The Internet moves amateur cultural production, unconstrained speech, and heretical values into the centre of history.

Beginning with the argument that capitalism aligns individual thought and action to its needs, /The Value System/ concludes with a theory of how the Internet mediates radical change across social, political, and economic areas of action. Human behaviour strongly suggests that there is something that drives us to use the Internet, an instinct for freedom. Contrary to conventional wisdom, cyberspace may yet remain the paragon of freedom in a world driven mad with authoritarian states and markets.

_________________________

Also by Michael Strangelove

The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement.
University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People.
University of Toronto Press, 2010.

Post-TV: Piracy, Cord-Cutting, and the Future of Television.
University of Toronto Press, 2015.


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