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.

Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory, Professor of Political Science, and the Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (PACTAC) at the University of Victoria. He is the editor with Marilouise Kroker of the internationally acclaimed scholarly, peer-reviewed journal CTheory

1. Trajectories of the Posthuman
ACCELERATE
2. The Posthuman Imagination: Exits to a Future of Neuro-Diversity, Psychic Trauma and History in the Data Feed
DRIFT
3. Code Drift
4. History Drift
5. Archive Drift
6. Screen Drift
7. Media Drift
CRASH
Slow Suicide of Technological Apocalypse
8. After the Drones
9. Guardian Liberalism: Rhetoric of the “Just War”
Traversal Consciousness
10. Premonitory Thought: That Fateful Day When Power Abjected Itself
EPILOGUE
11. Thinking the Future with Marshall McLuhan: Technologies of Abandonment, Inertia, Disappearance, Substitution