Exits to the Posthuman Future

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.

Acknowledgments vii 1 Introduction: Trajectories of the Posthuman 1 Accelerate 29 2 The Posthuman Imagination: Neuro-Diversity, Psychic Trauma, and History in the Data Feed 31 Drift 47 3 Code Drift 49 4 History Drift 60 5 Archive Drift 80 6 Screen Drift 90 7 Media Drift 97 Crash: Slow Suicide of Technological Apocalypse 109 8 After the Drones 111 9 Guardian Liberalism: Rhetoric of the “Just War” 122 Crash: Traversal Consciousness 153 10 Premonitory Thought: That Fateful Day When Power Abjected Itself 155 11 Thinking the Future with Marshall McLuhan: Technologies of Abandonment, Inertia, Disappearance, Substitution 173 12 Epilogue: Media Theory in the Data Storm 195 Notes 199 Index 207