Dispositions by McKenzie Wark

Armed with only a notebook and a GPS device, McKenzie Wark set out against the world in words. Each entry of Dispositions (Salt Publishing) is marked by Wark’s global position, and the date and time of entry. The style is part journal, part epic poem and in turns reminds me of the oblique observations of Jean Baudrillard, the playful verse of Lewis Carroll, and the incessant wordplay of James Joyce. Subsequently, Dispositions is rife with astute observations, memorable aphorisms, and quotable bon mots. Ground covered includes Deleuze and Guitarri, DJ Spooky, Walter Benjamin, 9/11, and lots of locales in New York City and Europe. Continue reading “Dispositions by McKenzie Wark”

Dead Cities by Mike Davis

The ground on which you walk is the tongue with which I talk — Saul Williams

Mike Davis gives voice to just what the hell we’ve done to our environment, what’s transpiring in the gaps in our relationships with each other, and what goes on underneath the deep and wide footprint of our rampant urban development. Dead Cities (The New Press) is a postmortem excavation of our postmodern urbanscape, a conjugation of all the verbs at work in the human condition. Continue reading “Dead Cities by Mike Davis”

Investigations by Stuart Kauffman

Stuart Kauffman has been probing the “deep structure” of life for decades. He is one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, the leading center for the emerging sciences of complexity. His work therein started in complex Boolean networks in which he found “order for free” in a void seeming to consist of nothing but chaos. This lead him to highly dynamical yet self-structuring autocatalytic sets (now known as “Kauffman sets”) which eventually lead him to search for a general biology from which all of life could extrapolate. Kauffman never was much for neo-Darwinism or natural selection, and here he continues his holistic approach to self-organizing biospheres. Continue reading “Investigations by Stuart Kauffman”

CTRL [SPACE] Edited by Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel

They’re everywhere: tiny cameras, webcams, security cameras… video-capturing devices are almost as ubiquitous as the banner ads for them: “Watch anyone, anytime.” We’re all stuck somewhere between reality TV and a TV reality. Following the panopticon from an eighteenth century architectural drawing by Jeremy Bentham to the pervasive surveillance of the twenty-first century, CTRL [SPACE] is a comprehensive history of watching and being watched. Continue reading “CTRL [SPACE] Edited by Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel”

Geeks by Jon Katz

Jon Katz’s latest book goes a long way to explain the recently-emerged member of society known as the geek by following two recent high school graduates, Jesse and Eric, out of the hinterlands of Idaho and into the corporate world of Chicago. Through the trials of the two boys, Katz inadvertently finds himself in the middle of the geeks’ story. Continue reading “Geeks by Jon Katz”

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Journalist Malcolm Gladwell has put together what is easily one of the most readable books about social phenomena out right now. Borrowing by analogy from epidemiology, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little Brown & Company) is a clear, concise analysis of social epidemics and why they “tip” (“The Tipping Point” is the name given to the moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass). Gladwell says, “If you talk to the people who study epidemics – epidemiologists – you realize that they have a strikingly different way of looking at the world. They don’t share the assumptions the rest of us have about how and why change happens.” Continue reading “The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell”