Abstract This chapter probes the technical and infrastructural operations of logistical apparatuses to propose the concept of the logistical episteme. The chapter examines how contemporary power is produced and organized within and through logistical technologies and industries specific to contemporary capitalism. The concept and material condition of the logistical episteme is elaborated with reference to […]
Category Archives: uncategorized
The Logistical Episteme
10-Oct-25Zoe Horn and Ned Rossiter “Images exist insofar as their media-habitats, ecosystems, and social practices exist and function to provide the structure of cognitive patterns for them.” Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 219. The public debut of […]
Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle Abstract Media staple environment to logistics as technologies that mediate the dynamic between contingency and entropy. Contingency interrupts plans, entropy introduces disorder. Media organize disruption and disorder as constitutive elements in the production of value enabled by technologies of capture and control. The power of logistical media resides precisely in […]
Dreamful Computing
18-Dec-22Ned Rossiter and Geert Lovink, interview by Shintaro Miyazaki. We start with the end, the final words Bernard Stiegler wrote in the last English translation before he died, The Age of Disruption (2019): “In order to do politics today, we must dream.” We cast techniques of dreaming in relation to the media question that underscores […]
By Maren Koehler and Ned Rossiter 1. Corridors Decide Corridors optimize economy through efficiency. Corridors strive to conquer time by channelling movement within spatial constraints. Corridors connect zones. Corridors bundle infrastructure along axes to narrow space and accelerate time. Corridors establish channels or pipelines of movement that intensify logistical organization and its accompanying tensions and […]
By Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter “People find themselves seemingly unable to create the conditions for a radical bifurcation—not the disruptive ‘radical innovation’ of the kind claimed by those startup entrepreneurs who present themsevles as ‘new barbarians‘, but, on the contrary, a bifurcation taking account of the radicality of this disruption from the perspective of […]
Provincial Media Theory Like all theory, media theory is troubled by its provincialism, even if it struggles to take note of this common condition. As many readers may recall, Heidegger famously refused a chair in Berlin, instead preferring to stay in the provinces. While the negative attributes of repressive culture, neurotic personas, and social intolerance […]
Organization after Social Media
14-Jun-18By Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter Organized networks are an alternative to the social media logic of weak links and their secretive economy of data mining. They put an end to freestyle friends, seeking forms of empowerment beyond the brief moment of joyful networking. This speculative manual calls for nothing less than social technologies based […]
Toward a Politics of Anonymity: Algorithmic Actors in the Constitution of Collective Agency
27-Apr-13By Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle The widespread adoption by users of social network media has increasingly rendered the border between life and labor indistinct. The human soul has been put to work, formatting its informatic expression in clouds without freedom.1 Some of the most radical political events witnessed over the past few years – […]
By Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle
When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural.
