Orders placed via our website can be paid using any of the following methods: Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control-and contest-it. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers-and the planet-it’s worse. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class.

Her most recent book is Capital Is Dead (Verso, 2019), in which she analyses the elements that make up the current digital production and power system.It’s not capitalism, it’s not neoliberalism – what if it’s something worse? Starting from the alternative worlds imagined by these two writers, she ponders the question of what kind of response is required by the present environmental crisis.

In 2017, she published Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso), an essay in which she uses the works of two science fiction novelists, Alexander Bogdanov and Kim Stanley Robinson, in order to reflect upon the Anthropocene Era and one of its chief threats: climate change. Also notable, along similar lines, is Gamer Theory (HUP, 2007), in which Wark pinpoints videogames as the emergent cultural form of our times. In her book A Hacker Manifesto (HUP, 2004), for example, she champions the emergence of a new social class, hackers, who are willing and able to combat the privatisation of knowledge in the Internet age. She has also studied in depth the social and political changes resulting from the inroads made by the information technologies into everyday life. She has published numerous essays of cultural criticism, including The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso, 2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso, 2013), both of which are concerned with the history of the Situationist International (SI) and the cultural and political legacy of its members. McKenzie Wark is a professor of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College at The New School for Social Research, in New York.

Capital is dead mckenzie wark