Digitally Disposed

Seb Franklin is senior lecturer in contemporary literature in the Department of English at King’s College London. He is author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic.

"Drawing beautifully on Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, and anti-racist feminist cultural theory, Seb Franklin offers a bold and rigorous critique of the social and epistemological processes of dispossession and abjection undergirding the informatics of value. This is a significant and powerful intervention, demonstrating the intimate intertwining of digitality and value-two linked modes of abstraction that shape social forms of free, self-possessed personhood only through the enactment of racialized and gendered forms of disposal. Through brilliant readings of the works of Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Samuel Delany, Sondra Perry, and Charles Babbage and extensive original archival research in the history of cybernetics, Franklin carefully tracks and restores what both information theory and dominant digital culture, in their fantasies of pure transmission and frictionless connection, depend on yet disavow: that is, the historical and present material violence of slavery, dispossession, unwaged reproduction, and superfluous populations at the heart of racial capitalism. An indispensable work, a model of critically engaged, synthetic scholarship, and an urgent reminder that ‘other ways of being free’ persist in forging connectivity beyond the informatics of value."-Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Barnard College, Columbia University"Why has digital culture perpetuated new forms of racial and gender inequality despite early hopes that it would make users more equal? Seb Franklin’s lucid readings of information theory and its affinities with the history of slavery and dispossession show the reader how informatics emerges historically through racial-capitalist dynamics. This book is a major contribution to the study of race, gender, and capacity as the foundation upon which the digital stands. Elegant, important, and compelling."-Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan"There's a brilliant moment-one of many-in Seb Franklin's new book, that turns the cyberlibertarian term 'digital native' inside out. . . . The Digitally Disposed's close readings, at once minute and expansive, demonstrate the deep and insidious connections between cybernetics, racial capitalism, and digital culture."-Media History"The Digitally Disposed establishes itself as critical reading and inspiration for the digital present, highlighting the continued need for anti-racist and anti-capitalist scholarship capable of rethinking the forms of knowledge and relation that connect our world."-Radical Philosophy"Through discriminating, situated readings, Franklin teases out how a logic of 'digitality' and 'disposal' takes shape at the sidelines of science and capitalism... These readings resonate with a larger strength of the book, Franklin’s knack for identifying overlooked fragments from a scientific career... [and] elicits from these works clues of still largely neglected economic and racial histories shaping digital infrastructures today."-Critical Inquiry

• ContentsIntroduction: Forms of DisposalPart I. The Informatics of Value1. Things Communicated: Messages, Persons, Goods2. Reliable Circuits, Unreliable Components: How Capital Connects3. The Informatics of Dispossession4. Differentiation as Regulation5. Two Models: Samuel R. Delany’s NeveryÓnaPart II. Media Histories of Disposal6. Human Use, or The Digital-Liberal Person7. Elemental Space: Coloniality and Flexibility8. Deplorable Alternatives: “Mechanical Slaves” and Upgradable Labor9. The Digital Atlantic: Sondra Perry’s Typhoon coming on10. Redundant Life: Intellectual Workers and Street Nuisances11. Anatomizing “Freedom”: Carceral Digitality12. The Cybernetics of Capacity: R.S. Hunt’s “Two Kinds of Work”Coda: The Human SurgeAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex