Heavy Processing

FORTHCOMING Fall 2023

What happens when we take the joke of “lesbian processing” seriously as a research method? Heavy Processing does just this, by tracing the multi-directional genealogies and vast affinities of processing-heavy methods as innovations in information technologies (operating systems, central processing units, network designs). Part methods handbook, manifesto, and survival guide, this book opens up the[…]

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World

Published: 09/22/2022

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social,[…]

Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI

Published: 03/02/2023

Before the company OpenAI publicly released their ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, Robert Leib had been a tester in OpenAI’s beta playground for GPT-3, a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine — a chatbot, or artificial intelligence. Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI is a series of dialogues between Leib, a continental philosopher, and GPT-3’s hive mind[…]

Escape Philosophy

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Published: 07/14/2022

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether. The physical body has often been seen as[…]

Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods

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Published: 09/15/2022

What does it mean to “speak for the social” in projects of technical and infrastructural change? This is the problem that the contributors to Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods set out to explore through a series of creative interventions that reimagine the role for qualitative social science in understanding and shaping design[…]

Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy

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Published: 12/15/2021

When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media – music, videos, games, and software – before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release[…]

Follow for Now, Vol. 2: More Interviews with Friends and Heroes

Published: 09/16/2021

Follow for Now, Vol. 2 picks up and pushes beyond the first volume with a more diverse set of interviews. The intent of the first collection was to bring together voices from across disciplines, to cross-pollinate ideas. At the time, social media wasn’t crisscrossing all of the lines and certain categories held a bit more[…]

Cinema’s Doppelgängers

Published: 06/17/2021

Cinema’s Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema — or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it’s a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time – a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the[…]