Who owns your body? The answer may not be as simple as you think… A living corporate mascot genetically engineered to evoke the uncontrollable desire to consume. A sexbot determined to survive at any cost after her human owner throws her away. An experimental surgery that offers a washed-up pop star eternal youth… for a price. Who owns the technology that makes our bodies what they are? And how much ownership does that give them over us? The sequel to Digital Soul, this collection of six science fiction stories what—and who—makes our bodies what they are… and what the cost might be. This collection contains the following short stories: Goddess of Beauty and War Animal Systems Charge Me Up After the Glory Days Made For Your Consumption Working Conditions

Social media is full of dead people. Nobody knows precisely how many Facebook profiles belong to dead users but in 2012 the figure was estimated at 30 million. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital dead are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead.

The game is no longer about adventures in a new world or exploring fantasy lands. Grant’s digital wife faces deletion, along with everyone else he cares for. He, and those who know this is more than a game event, search for clues to salvation left behind by the game's creators. Even if he finds them all, the Voices have one last task for their messenger. A sacrifice. Fifth and final book in the series. Gamelit, LitRPG, depression, recovery, fantasy land, VRMMO, virtual reality

A wide-ranging, interconnected anthology presents a diversity of feminist contributions to digital humanities In recent years, the digital humanities has been shaken by important debates about inclusivity and scope—but what change will these conversations ultimately bring about? Can the digital humanities complicate the basic assumptions of tech culture, or will this body of scholarship and practices simply reinforce preexisting biases? Bodies of Information addresses this crucial question by assembling a varied group of leading voices, showcasing feminist contributions to a panoply of topics, including ubiquitous computing, game studies, new materialisms, and cultural phenomena like hashtag activism, hacktivism, and campaigns against online misogyny. Taking intersectional feminism as the starting point for doing digital humanities, Bodies of Information is diverse in discipline, identity, location, and method. Helpfully organized around keywords of materiality, values, embodiment, affect, labor, and situatedness, this comprehensive volume is ideal for classrooms. And with its multiplicity of viewpoints and arguments, it’s also an important addition to the evolving conversations around one of the fastest growing fields in the academy. Contributors: Babalola Titilola Aiyegbusi, U of Lethbridge; Moya Bailey, Northeastern U; Bridget Blodgett, U of Baltimore; Barbara Bordalejo, KU Leuven; Jason Boyd, Ryerson U; Christina Boyles, Trinity College; Susan Brown, U of Guelph; Lisa Brundage, CUNY; micha cárdenas, U of Washington Bothell; Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown U; Danielle Cole; Beth Coleman, U of Waterloo; T. L. Cowan, U of Toronto; Constance Crompton, U of Ottawa; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M; Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, U of Colorado Boulder; Julia Flanders, Northeastern U Library; Sandra Gabriele, Concordia U; Brian Getnick; Karen Gregory, U of Edinburgh; Alison Hedley, Ryerson U; Kathryn Holland, MacEwan U; James Howe, Rutgers U; Jeana Jorgensen, Indiana U; Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY; Dorothy Kim, Vassar College; Kimberly Knight, U of Texas, Dallas; Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson U; Sharon M. Leon, Michigan State; Izetta Autumn Mobley, U of Maryland; Padmini Ray Murray, Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology; Veronica Paredes, U of Illinois; Roopika Risam, Salem State; Bonnie Ruberg, U of California, Irvine; Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel), U of California, Santa Barbara; Anastasia Salter, U of Central Florida; Michelle Schwartz, Ryerson U; Emily Sherwood, U of Rochester; Deb Verhoeven, U of Technology, Sydney; Scott B. Weingart, Carnegie Mellon U.

This book takes readers into stories of love, loss, grief and mourning and reveals the emotional attachments and digital kinships of the virtual 3D social world of Second Life. At fourteen years old, Second Life can no longer be perceived as the young, cutting-edge environment it once was, and yet it endures as a place of belonging, fun, role-play and social experimentation. In this volume, the authors argue that far from facing an impending death, Second Life has undergone a transition to maturity and holds a new type of significance. As people increasingly explore and co-create a sense of self and ways of belonging through avatars and computer screens, the question of where and how people live and die becomes increasingly more important to understand. This book shows how a virtual world can change lives and create forms of memory, nostalgia and mourning for both real and avatar based lives.

In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, Arthur Kroker explores the future of the 21st century in the language of technological destiny. Presenting Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche as prophets of technological nihilism, Kroker argues that every aspect of contemporary culture, society, and politics is coded by the dynamic unfolding of the 'will to technology.' Moving between cultural history, our digital present, and the biotic future, Kroker theorizes on the relationship between human bodies and posthuman technology, and more specifically, wonders if the body of work offered by thinkers like Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche is a part of our past or a harbinger of our technological future. Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche intensify our understanding of the contemporary cultural climate. Heidegger's vision posits an increasingly technical society before which we have become 'objectless objects'? driftworks in a 'culture of boredom.' In Marx, the disciplining of capital itself by the will to technology is a code of globalization, first announced as streamed capitalism. Nietzsche mediates between them, envisioning in the gathering shadows of technological society the emergent signs of a culture of nihilism. Like Marx, he insists on thinking of the question of technology in terms of its material signs. In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, Kroker consistently enacts an invigorating and innovative vision, bringing together critical theory, art, and politics to reveal the philosophic apparatus of technoculture.

This collection reflects on the emerging phenomenon of ‘selfie citizenship’, which capitalises on individual visibility and agency, at the time when citizenship itself is increasingly governed through biometrics and large-scale dataisation. Today we are witnessing a global rise of politicised selfies: photographs of individuals with handwritten notes or banners, various selfie memes and hashtag actions, spread on social media in actions of protest or social mobilistion. Contributions in this collection range from discussions of citizen engagement, to political campaigning, to selfies as forms of citizen witnessing, to selfies without a face. The chapters cover uses of selfies by activists, tourists and politicians, victims and survivors, adults and children, in a broad range of geopolitical locations –China, Germany, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, the UK and the US. Written by an international and interdisciplinary group of authors, from senior professors to junior scholars, artists, graduate students and activist, the book is aimed at students, researchers, and media practitioners.

After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?

Exits to the Posthuman Future is media theory for a global digital society which thrives, and sometimes perishes, at the intersection of technologies of speed, distant ethics and a pervasive cultural anxiety. Arthur Kroker’s incisive and insightful text presents the emerging pattern of a posthuman future: life at the tip of technologies of acceleration, drift and crash. Kroker links key concepts such as “Guardian Liberalism” and Obama’s vision of the “Just War” with a striking account of “culture drift” as the essence of real world technoculture. He argues that contemporary society displays growing uncertainty about the ultimate ends of technological innovation and the intelligibility of the digital future. The posthuman future is elusive: is it a gathering storm of cynical abandonment, inertia, disappearance and substitution? Or else the development of a new form of critical consciousness - the posthuman imagination - as a means of comprehending the full complexity of life? Depending on which exit to the posthuman future we choose or, perhaps, which exit chooses us, Kroker argues that a very different posthuman future will likely ensue.