Digitality, Racial Capitalism, and the Informatics of Value
This talk examines the racial-capitalist foundations of digital notions of information, communication, and self-regulation. Drawing on published and archival media-historical material, Franklin will argue that the complex of value and dispossession constitutes an informatic mechanism whose logical and material foundations shape the twentieth-century development of digital devices, ways of seeing, and modes of organisation.
About Seb Franklin
Seb Franklin is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at King's College London, where he is a co-convenor of the MA program in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (MIT Press, 2015) and Forms of Disposal: Digitality, Racial Capitalism, and the Informatics of Value (forthcoming in 2021 from University of Minnesota Press). His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in venues including Grey Room, Social Text, Novel, and Camera Obscura.