Susan Zieger

This book describes new affective and material modes of print media consumption that emerged in the nineteenth century, when ephemeral printed material and objects became part of everyday modern life. It offers a history of our own moment of digital absorption, information addiction, and social media obsession.

Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century

The Mediated Mind

From supply chains to surveillance, how logistics drives modern power—and its consequences.
 
Movement is the lifeblood of capital, even more so than growth. If goods, people, and information don't flow, then profits don't either. Ensuring that laborers, shipping containers, media, commercially valuable data, and much else are in the right place at the right time demands a subtle choreography. Enter logistics.
 
Susan Zieger argues that logistics is the foundation of power in our time. Blending detailed historical research with real-life stories that crystallize the human and ecological consequences of supply chains, Logistics and Power shows how the pursuit of efficient movement has come to organize economies while disordering societies and selves. Logistics emerges as the key to consumerism and the experience of work. It justifies corporate and police surveillance, illuminates patterns of migration and exploitation, and explains why the oceans are clotted with plastic. It is in the sphere of logistics that capitalist motives are most dramatically in tension with planetary needs.
 
A headfirst encounter with the obscure forces subordinating all goals below those of capital, Logistics and Power points the way to an alternative: a mindful and politically attentive kind of movement compatible with human thriving.

Supply chains from slavery to space

Logistics and Power

Nicole Starosielski

Matthew Hockenberry

The contributors to Assembly Codes examine how media and logistics set the conditions for the circulation of information and culture. They document how logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—has substantially impacted the production, distribution, and consumption of media. At the same time, physical media, such as paperwork, along with media technologies ranging from phone systems to software are central to the operations of logistics. The contributors interrogate topics ranging from the logistics of film production and the construction of internet infrastructure to the environmental impact of the creation, distribution, and sale of vinyl records. They also reveal how logistical technologies have generated new aesthetic and performative practices. In charting the specific points of contact, dependence, and friction between media and logistics, Assembly Codes demonstrates that media and logistics are co-constitutive and that one cannot be understood apart from the other. Contributors Ebony Coletu, Kay Dickinson, Stefano Harney, Matthew Hockenberry, Tung-Hui Hu, Shannon Mattern, Fred Moten, Michael Palm, Ned Rossiter, Nicole Starosielski, Liam Cole Young, Susan Zieger

Susan Zieger

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