My New Left Review piece on Surveillance Capitalism has just been published in Spanish translation by Latin American magazine Nueva Sociedad.

On 10 November I took part in a debate with Dennis Graemer of the Association for the Design of History as part of the “Sheltering Places” public series at the New Center for Research & Practice.

It seems these guys were hoping to set up a confrontation between their chosen brand name of “left accelerationism” and a certain “communisation theory” that is reputed to be a reincarnation of anarcho-primitivism.

I’ve never had much interest in either of those identities—both of which it should be noted were largely constructed by Ben Noys—let alone in rhetorical pittings of the two against each other. I made it clear before participating that I could thus not represent one against the other, and would only be interested in a more substantive discussion. The organisers dutifully made some minor concessions in presentation, but it seems this rhetorical structure could not be avoided.

Needless to say, as someone who has spent the bulk of their adult life immersed in the concrete problems of technology, I am not a primitivist; nor do I have any need for blanket affirmations of modernity and technical change. My position on such things is most clearly articulated in the Endnotes text “Error“. (More on this later.)

Still, we managed to have a reasonable debate, and Meier and Graemer are good interlocutors when the radical brandings are set aside.