Alex Quicho

Since the first military drone strikes, the drone has been seen as emblematic of Western hegemony, emphasising the asymmetry of modern warfare. The military drone, whose combined surveillance and killing technology was first realised in the 1980s, has given rise to today’s consumer drone, even as drone warfare continues to incinerate civilians in areas of Asia and Africa. By exploring the use of the drone as medium in the works of three artists — Laura Poitras, Anne Imhof, and Korakrit Arunanondchai — Small Gods examines how the drone’s new, consumer format has not left this bloodied legacy behind, but instead imports it into everyday life. It presents a broad and detailed analysis of how socioeconomic and geopolitical concerns have shaped image-making practices, not only in concept but in form, and considers how this has changed our perceptions of humanity itself. More info via http://amfq.net/small-gods

Meet Me In The Present: Documents and their Afterlives is an anthology of essays which examines the power of collective action. Spanning twenty-one acts of resistance — from letters exchanged between black power activists to the ethos of protest being brought into the Victoria and Albert Museum — and with an afterword by critic Orit Gat, these essays consider what it means to survive against all odds within a changing society. Drawing from the motives and experiences of those who have protected the right to access shared resources, Meet Me in the Present tells the stories of these diverse defenders. The book calls for public spaces, and for ideas to be made public in a time when ‘the commons’ is increasingly under attack.

Edited by Alex Quicho, Camilla Brown, Hatty Nestor, Laura Fava, Sarah Thacker, and Zachary Soudan
Design by Tom Finn and Jake Tollady

A rigorous and mind-blowing account of the dynamics of capitalism today through an in-depth exposition of software, speculative finance, and the highest scales of arbitrage.

At the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:

"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it's tired, it's not especially good at the internet, it's probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts—though digitally native—are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is—in the parlance of the above—a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn't understand scale."

Introduction by Charles Mudede.
Afterword by Alex Quicho.

"A masterpiece... Nick Land for adults."
— 0nty