Andrew Lison, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak and Rick Prelinger Archives

Abstract

pedigree in forced labour, slavery, and extreme discipline and control over other human beings’ (p. 2). The concept of digital materiality that he uses is an attempt to acknowledge precisely that – ‘the disciplined and orderly subjugation of generations of workers and their families subordinated to providing a supplying role in the glorious onslaught of technological progress’ (p. 3). Gottlieb points out that every digital device inevitably promotes the electronics industry itself. Therefore, ‘Digital information’s materiality is in the devices which provide and process it. And these need to be made, in the extreme disciplinarily of industry. . . Reason forces us to admit that our technical accomplishments are tainted with colonialism, genocide and patriarchy’ (p. 5). The book is split into seven substantive chapters on domestication, abstraction, automation, digitization, fabrication, materialisation and emancipation. It offers ‘a methodical materialist understanding of digital technologies’ by also tracing the history of materialism – from the Greek physicist-philosophers to the humanist and historical materialism of the Enlightenment to the post-humanist new materialism. Gottlieb poses a lot of food for thought from a particular ideological standpoint.