The Message is Murder

Reviews / Votes

'Jonathan Beller powerfully addresses the most urgent issue of today's political economy: the gradual merging of capital and computation into new structures of power' -- Matteo Pasquinelli, Professor of Media Theory, University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe 'Beller is one of the leading and pioneering theorists of the political economy of attention. This book is extremely pertinent for a readership seeking news ways of understanding contemporary capitalism. Beller has developed an original strategy by placing media archaeology and critical race theory in dialogue with the popularized work of Marshall McLuhan, and also by using Marx and Borges as interlocutors of well-known cyber-theorists such as Turing and Shannon' -- Allen Feldman, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and author of Archives of the Insensible 'So-called digital culture operates on and intensifies a substrate of racial-capitalist calculation that precedes the invention of the electronic digital computer. Jonathan Beller's remarkable book examines the implications of this foundational claim through 'poetico-theoretical' analyses of information theory, literature, and cinema. By tracking the co-constitutive operations of economics, informatics, visuality, and psychology, Beller reveals the violent formations that ground contemporary mediatic regimes' -- Seb Franklin, author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic