New from Telos Press: Timothy W. Luke's Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society

Now available for pre-order: Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, by Timothy W. Luke. Pre-order today in our online store and save 30% off the list price. Release date: December 1, 2020. Also save 30% on Luke’s Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique and on A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory, edited by Tim Luke and Ben Agger.

Screens of Power
Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society

by Timothy W. Luke
With a Foreword by Ronald J. Deibert
Release date: December 1, 2020

This new edition of Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, first published in 1989, reintroduces the innovative critique of informational culture, politics, and society outlined by Timothy W. Luke in Telos and other publications during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much has changed, but far more has stayed the same, making this new edition useful for many readers, as digital images ground personal identity, informatics is geopolitics, grand history endlessly reruns as televisually formatted ritual, electronic electioneering never ends, tele-traditional cultures spin up the spirit of tele-ethnicity in new social movements, and digital divides continue crashing against cybernetic exchange.

On now countless screens of power, which are embedded in billions of smartphones, taxi seats, elevator panels, automobile dashboards, refrigerator doors, airport walls, work cubicles, skyscraper displays, exercise machines, and home video centers, a mix of disinformative mystifications exploits with vivid images of violence the unprecedented inequalities and inequities expressed in America’s bitter racial, gender, ethnic, and class conflicts. Their impact is sparking widespread popular resistance because many citizens feel oligarchy and demagoguery in both political parties are eclipsing democracy and opportunity.

Continue reading →

The Dark Arts Reach the Internet

It is difficult to know what constitutes the latest social media “scandal” for the news organizations that promote it as such. Of course, it follows the seemingly unending political concerns around social and digital media since the election of President Trump and other cornerstone events such as the Brexit vote. It stands in the long line of concerns about email hacking, Russian “meddling,” “fake news,” undignified presidential tweeting, and bots, and the indictments of workers of a Russian internet agency. There is the more general, but somewhat vacuous, thesis that the “politics of truth” has been replaced by a “politics of untruth.” Within this framing, there is the sense that “democracy” is under attack through social media; that populists, the “alt-right,” shady billionaire donors, foreign authoritarians and nativist Svengalis have found secret pathways to sow discontent within Western democracies and tip elections and plebiscites to previously unconscionable leaders and unimaginable outcomes.

Continue reading →

On the Legacy of September 11

The aftermath of the War on Terror rages on despite bipartisan assurances that “major combat operations are over” and that “the war is coming to a close.” This ongoing conflict has produced, and continues to produce, prodigious human casualties and economic hemorrhaging. Tim Luke’s words regarding September 11, 2001, are in many ways as timely today as they were nearly fourteen years ago.

Continue reading →