The World Computer

“Tackling one of the most important issues in media and technology theory today—the intimate and ancient involvement between information and power—Jonathan Beller has written a bold book with intellectual originality, sociopolitical relevance, and evocative power.” - Alexander R. Galloway, author of Laruelle: Against the Digital

“In The World Computer, Jonathan Beller charts the lineage and lineaments of ‘computational racial capital.’ In the code-based mode of capitalist production now consolidating itself with hegemonic reach, the image replaces the commodity as the fundamental value form, and as it does the meaning of labor mutates. Racism, Beller argues, is not just an incidental effect of ambient bias contaminating this new machinery of extraction. It is written into its DNA. The World Computer is a passionate analysis of how the phase-shift of contemporary capitalism we are currently experiencing carries forward from its colonial past a coefficient of exploitation that intensifies apace with capital's exponentially increasing powers of abstraction. Beller's provocative genealogy of contemporary capitalism is an essential contribution to understanding the evolving economy as a formation of power, in symbiosis with systemic racism.” - Brian Massumi, author of 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto

“The World Computer has been published at an opportune moment, a moment that calls for further theoretical explanation of the social horrors that ‘computational racial capital’ mediates and produces. Its greatest strength lies in its provocative and synthetic reading of research across fields.” - Cengiz Salman, The Communication Review

“At the heart of this complex, ambitious, and difficult book is an intriguing idea: that the logic of capitalism has been to turn the entire world into a computer.... [Beller’s] book can be recommended for anyone interested in the critical theory of information.” - Sam Popowich, College and Research Libraries

“A must read for those across multiple fields, including digital culture and sociology, software and media studies, as well as science and technology studies. . . . TheWorld Computer demonstrate[s] that digital technologies, algorithms, and AI cannot be deracialized without an undoing — and overcoming — of the social relations that they are part of.” - Josh Bowsher, Cultural Politics

"A must read. . .  wide ranging and historically far reaching. . . ." - David H. Fleming, Film-Philosophy