The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
by Langdon Winner (1986)
The foundational text on the non-neutrality of technology. Demanding us to always ask: what kind of worlds do our technologies build? Do they express our best impulses? Or do they simply expand the wealth and power of the few—those who take no care to enhance the common good and to remove longstanding patterns of social injustice? A mind-expanding, myth-dispelling book.
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
by Simone Browne (2015)
A much needed insight into the surveillance of blackness. Reminding us how the weight of surveillance always lands heaviest on those with the least power. A modern classic.
Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job
by Gavin Mueller (2021)
Using long derided historical labor movements as frameworks to rethink our relationships to work, especially those dismissed by those wishing to boost technological progress—this book brilliantly illuminates both larger organized resistance as well as the every-day acts that we enact in order to produce some dignity under hostile and uncaring systems. Being “bad” at your job has never felt more politically potent.
Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film
by John David Rhodes (2017)
A welcome reminder of the central figure of the house and the home in cinematic language. What happens when a medium becomes fixated with private property? The boundaries and the protection of it. What politics do cinematic homes enact and upon whom? Makes you wonder what new cinema has and will emerge from current and future generations that will never own property.
The Burrow
by Franz Kafka (1928)
A brief and unfinished work by the master in which an unidentified animal descends into castle doctrine paranoia over the quest for a decent night’s sleep. Its incompleteness only makes it stronger, stranger, and in our current moment increasingly insightful into the promises offered and the nightmares fueled by domestic surveillance cultures.
Graeme Arnfield
