Affiliation:
1. English and Related Literature, University of York
Abstract
Digital technologies have come to frame the everyday interactions of our world, meshing together public and private spaces into seamless singular platforms for work, socialisation and leisure. At the centre of these transformations are the market imperatives of companies who trade in predictions based upon behavioural data, utilising a range of surveillance strategies to capture information that shapes the most effective corporate interventions into our lives. Shoshana Zuboff's 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power provides a thorough overview of these issues, constructing a new vocabulary with which to identify the forces that shape political, financial, and social processes on a global scale. However, the book maintains a liberal political alignment which reaffirms the powers of the right, advocating for a partial technological deceleration which preserves the violent political-economic foundations underpinning surveillance and digital control. This article examines Margaret Atwood's The Testaments and Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, two contemporary novels which test out the predictions of technodeterminist logic in unequivocal ways, in order to interrogate the imaginative limitations prevalent in responses to data capitalism.
Publisher
Open Library of the Humanities
Reference32 articles.
1. Adams, Annie. “Megan Abbott on the Difference Between Hardboiled and Noir.” Literary Hub. 26 June, 2018. Accessed 10 September, 2020. https://lithub.com/megan-abbott-on-the-difference-between-hardboiled-and-noir/
2. “The Exhausted Futures of Neoliberalism: From Promissory Legitimacy to Social Anomy.”;Beckert, Jens;Journal of Cultural Economy,2018