Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living (Socialist Register 2021)

"As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it not only refashioned our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed not only the lack of investment, planning and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses by states around the world, but also grotesque class and racial inequalities as it coursed its way through the population and the owners of high-tech corporations were enriched by tens of billions of dollars. Rejecting both technological determinism and facile 'cyber-utopian' thinking, the 57th annual volume of the Socialist Register addresses how to imagine, struggle for, and plan for, new democratic socialist ways of living after the pandemic." -- publisher's description Cover CONTENTS CONTRIBUTORS PREFACE REAPING THE WHIRLWIND THE TIME OF OUR LIVES INTERPRETATION MACHINES THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DATAFICATION AND WORK THE BIG TECH MONOPOLIES AND THE STATE SOCIALISTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS IMAGINING PLATFORM SOCIALISM WORKING-CLASS CINEMA IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL CAPITALISM THE SURVEILLANCE OF SERVICE LABOUR FROM NEOLIBERAL FASHION TO NEW WAYS OF CLOTHING SHIFTING GEARS COMMUNITY RESTAURANTS START EARLY, STAY LATE HEALTH CARE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIALIZED MEDICINE LIFE AFTER THE PANDEMIC DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PLANNING POSTCAPITALISM: ALTERNATIVES OR DETOURS? "How to live with the new technologies? Essays in the fifty-seventh Socialist Register reveal the contradictions and dislocations of technological change in the twenty-first century. And they explore alternative ways of living: from AI to the arts, from transportation to fashion, from environmental science to economic planning." --Amazon.ca