Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed

Often dissident, sometimes adherent, Nothing About is, in essence, indefinable because it is adaptive and fluid. Speculative or hands-on, this discipline – if we can call it that – displays all the ambivalences of our contemporary lifestyles: superficial and profound, profane and divine, present everywhere and nowhere, and often regarded as futile, even though it could nonetheless destroy the most beautiful of insides. This book brings together a variety of intellectual tools and insights – polysemic and ambiguous, bespoke and improvised, ornamental and criminal, spanning media, technology, the arts and other, often undefined fields – that analyze the impact of the discipline on contemporary design. In the end, what makes Nothing About charming is that this inside – insofar as it is still defined as such – has only the humble ambition of accompanying beings, both animate and inanimate, within their environment, like a friend who is never far away. 

Introduction by Javier Fernández Contreras. Text contributions by Daniel Zamarbide, Line Fontana & David Fagart, Valentin Dubois & Bertrand Van Dorp, Camille Bagnoud & Ahmed Belkhodja, Javier F. Contreras & Roberto Zancan, Paule Perron, Philippe Rahm, Youri Kravtchenko, Leonid Slonimskiy, Simon Husslein, Vera Sacchetti, Jan Dominik Geipel, Valentina De Luigi, Jean-Pierre Greff.

What does ‘user-friendly’ website mean if, on it, online behaviors like stalking, teasing, and ghosting — once considered peripheral — are now central to survival, care, and belonging? How to thrive without becoming an “Interdisciplinary Unicorn”: the state’s most beloved user-citizen fluent in multiple registers of production, optimization, and self-branding? How in this beautiful world is one supposed to log off, when surveillance and privacy erosion have been normalized? And how, oh how, could users possibly think of building the alternatives, when cool and cringe online acts, all activate the platform’s reward system: the unleashing of emoji-filled praise? How to resist the platform’s toxic seduction? 

Haunted by screenshots of early cyberfeminist websites and in dialogue with digital sages, web scripts, and business interests, media artist, web developer, and author Maisa Imamović embarks on a philosophical and practice-based crusade through the internet’s surface and its shadows. To expose the various ways of thriving online without surrendering to optimization, the book explores imperfect uses of perfect software, preservation of precarious web infrastructures, tactical content strategies, and experiments with autonomous financial systems — all wrapped in educational efforts to sustain criticality amid automation. Through these traversals beneath the scroll, Maisa finds her Webland: speculative, broken, and oftentimes, poetic infrastructure where logic destabilizes, binaries dissolve, and meaning evades monetization. But can a non-extractive internet exist beyond metaphor? Can poetry rewire protocol? Or will her sanctuary be absorbed into the very architectures it resists?

"In Maisa in Webland, Maisa Imamovic evokes the multidimensional, spontaneous human elements of the early web, using interviews, case studies, critical theory and fiction as her organic materials. She peeks behind the screen and through time to trace the subtle erosion of the web’s early utopian ideals to its cold and extractive present. Imamovic bravely wades through the swampy digital muck that mediates our everyday reality, examining its invisible psychic scaffolding with academic rigor, and a big dose of humor and heart. Was it an inevitable entropy, or an aberration? How and when did we get so off-course? Can we return? Do we want to? In Maisa’s Webland, we might very well be doomed, and maybe that’s a good thing. When the center of this tangled web no longer holds, something new can take shape.” - Nada Alic, author of Bad Thoughts

The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.

‘On 20 December 2015 I became a mother and I went mad.’ 

On a single day, Mar García Puig gives birth to twins and becomes elected to the Spanish Parliament as a member of the insurgent left-wing party Podemos. What might have been the best day of her life becomes the start of a terrifying ordeal; García Puig’s grip on reality begins to slip as she grapples with uncertainty, the weight of expectation, and misogyny in both of her new roles. 

In defiance of a culture that tells her the problem lies within, García Puig chooses to look outwards, examining the imbrication of madness and motherhood across centuries of science, myth, and politics while dissecting the ways in which women have been pathologized and banished from public life. 

At once intimate and epic, The History of the Vertebrate is a searing account of postpartum madness. Moving between memory, culture, and the history of medicine, García Puig transforms her experience into a story about the countless women who have felt that sanity was leaving them, and about the patriarchal forces that have silenced them. 

MAR GARCÍA PUIG is an editor and author. From 2015 to 2023 she was a member of the Spanish Congress of Deputies for Podemos, where she served on the Culture Committee and the Equality Committee. Her books include The History of the Vertebrate and This Thing of Darkness.

Pour les révolutionnaires des deux derniers siècles, l’accumulation du capital devait unifier la classe ouvrière sous la bannière du sujet révolutionnaire. Le mouvement ainsi né était appelé à renverser la société de classes et les clivages divisant les prolétaires. Mais le mouvement de la valeur a finalement triomphé, pour donner naissance à la société de la séparation. L’atomisation a pris le pas sur les puissances du rassemblement. La civilisation du capital traverse aujourd’hui une crise sans fin, mais les forces capables de la défaire brillent par leur absence.

Ces textes tirés de la revue Endnotes, réunis pour la première fois en français, dessinent la carte d’un présent ponctué de paysages désindustrialisés, de centres logistiques et de bidonvilles où s’entassent les populations rejetées aux marges de l’accumulation – autant de coordonnées nécessaires pour continuer à penser le dépassement du capitalisme : une fois encore, reprendre le chantier de l’hypothèse communiste.

Endnotes est une revue théorique communiste produite par un groupe de discussion du même nom basé en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis.

Traduction: Pablo Arnaud
Préface: Aaron Benanav Et John Clegg

An impassioned discussion about the alternative ways to form relationships and resist capitalism.

Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.

Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.

Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.

An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.

From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how we arrived at our contemporary understanding of what a mother is and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth-century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media. 

Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.

Hannah Zeavin is Associate Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure and Mother Media (MIT Press) and Founding Editor of Parapraxis. In 2021, she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation.