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Abstract: In their article "Precarious Cosmopolitanism in O'Neill's Netherland and Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow" Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson propose a comparative reading of two twenty-first cen ...

Abstract: In late 2011, ex-Amazon developer Steve Yegge’s rant about his former company described Amazon’s rapid transformation from an online bookstore to a web-services entity with a ruthlessly unified platform, all guided by the idea that the company’s effort to streamline its internal efficiency could be monetized, and the resultant software products sold through Amazon Web Services. The media consumerism that fed Amazon’s early years funded a surveilling behemoth, one that everyone feared Microsoft would become. As such, AWS has become a manifestation of the internet’s Lacanian unconscious (even providing the services and hosting for Reddit), structured around the optimization of Amazon’s business model, built line by line with the labor of easily discarded programmers. In this article, we shall examine the subtle and far-reaching effects of Amazon Web Services platform on the Amazon storefront, “cloud services,” and social media, as well as the origins of AWS in theories of programming grounded in neural network theory and “artificial life,” as opposed to AI. In the end, AWS will be shown to be its own unique entity, a platform infinitely extensible, inexhaustible, and a monument to the circumlocutions of cybernetic capital.

Abstract: In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of culture and economics. This ideological connection between conspiratorial thinking and economic incentives produced leftist and Marxist counter-narratives. The authors argue that the rise of BreadTube (Kuznetsov and Ismangil; Maddox and Creech) addresses this radicalization by re-deploying the mass-education model using the tenets of capitalism via normalized practices of YouTube algorithms to create pro-socialist and anti-right-wing content.

Abstract: “What is the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space,” asks Kanishka Goonewardena, “in producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban everyday life […] and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?” (55). Goonewardena’s account of the “urban sensorium” describes the mediatory, ideological role played by space in this “gap,” informing his adaptation of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” as a hermeneutics of urban experience vis-à-vis totality. This article considers the mediation of these insights as critical aesthetic strategies in two global city novels written in the post-2008/11 recessionary period, Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014). The former thematizes the obfuscating ideological function of “depthless” space in the late neoliberal era, while the latter pursues an immanent cognitive mapping project predicated on the interpretation of everyday urban life.