Machine

On the social consequences of machines

Automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of central media-philosophical concern in today’s society of humans and machines. This volume describes the social consequences of machines as a mediating concept for the animation of life and automation of technology. Bernard Stiegler’s automatic society illustrates how digital media networks establish a new proletariat of knowledge workers. Gertrud Koch offers the animation of the technical to account for the pathological relations that arise between people and their devices. And Thomas Pringle synthesizes how automation and animation explain the history of intellectual exchanges that led to the hybrid concept of the ecosystem, a term that blends computer and natural science. All three contributions analyse how categories of life and technology become mixed in governmental policies, economic exploitation and pathologies of everyday life thereby both curiously and critically advancing the term that underlies those new developments: ‘machine.’ 

Bernard Stiegler is head of the Institut de recherche et d’innovation du Centre Pompidou and president of the Ars Industrialis association. He is author of more than thirty books, including the recent English translation of Automatic Society: The Future of Work (2017).

Gertrud Koch is senior professor at the Freie Universität Berlin and visiting professor at Brown University. She is the author of numerous books, including Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even.

Thomas Patrick Pringle is a SSHRC Doctoral and Presidential fellow at Brown University, where he is a PhD Candidate in the department of Modern Culture and Media. He has published on the intersection of media, technology, and the environment in The Journal of Film and Video and NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies.