There is something rotten about network society. Although the information economy promises to create new forms of wealth and social cooperation, the real subsumption of labour under post-Fordism has instead produced a social factory of precarious labour and cybernetic surveillance. In this context people have turned to networks as an ersatz solution to social problems. Networks become the agent of history, a technological determinism that in the best-case scenario leads to post-capitalism but at worst leads to new forms of exploitation and inequality. Don’t Network proposes a third option to technocratic biocapitalism and social movement horizontalism, an analysis of the ways in which vanguard politics and avant-garde aesthetics can today challenge the ideologies of the network society.
“The Hacienda has been built, but as a network economy that turns everyone into cannibalistic creatives that devour themselves and the planet satisfying the insatiable demands of the market. Don’t Network offers a lucid analysis of the new class war going on in contemporary art and politics.” – Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, author of After the Great Refusal
“Don’t Network presents a compelling argument that outlines and undermines the hold of contemporary positivisms in politics, aesthetic and the social sciences. The book develops Lacanian schemas of incompleteness and Marxist dialectics to advance negation, rather than connectivity, as the core of any potential cultural avant-garde, and as part of a manifest vision for radical movements beyond diffuse and atomised moments of resistance.” – Marina Vishmidt, author of Speculation as a Mode of Production
