This book explores the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the digital environment: technology offers all manner of promises, yet habitually fails to deliver. This failure often arises from numerous problems: the proficiency of the technology or end-user, policy failure at various levels, or a combination of these. Solutions such as better technology and more effective end-user education are often put into place to solve these failures. Mike Healy argues that such approaches are inherently faulty drawing upon qualitative research informed by Marx’s theory of alienation. Using Marx’s theory, he considers participants in three distinct settings: the workplace of information and communications technology (ICT) professionals; university scholars researching the ethical and societal implications of our digital environment; and a group of pensioners living in South London, UK, undertaking ICT training. By delving beneath the surface of how digital technologies are created, researched and experienced, this study illustrates the contradictory nature of our digital lives, as they directly arise from the needs of capitalism. The book also places Marx’s theory in contrast to the mainstream approaches derived from Seaman and Blauner. In researching and comprehending ICT, this book reaffirms the superior explanatory power of Marx’s theory of alienation.

In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another. Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

The past several years have brought staggering advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence. And Marxist analysis has to keep up: while machines were always central to Marxist analysis, modern AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Inhuman Power explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through three approaches, each using the lens of a different Marxist theoretical concept. While the idea of widespread AI tends to be celebrated as much as questioned, a deeper analysis of its reach and potential produces a more complex and disturbing picture than has been identified. Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI is likely to render humanity obsolete and that the only way to prevent it is a communist revolution.

A wide-ranging, myth-busting and balanced materialist account of an overheated discourse

In the Nineteenth-century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. The luddites weren't primitive and they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the twenty-first century world. Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labour and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. The task is intimidating, but the seeds of this resistance are already present in the neo-Luddite efforts of hackers, pirates, and dark web users who are challenging surveillance and control, often through older systems of communication technology.

David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity rationalised capitalism’s transformation during an extraordinary year: 1989. It gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting properly started – globalisation and postmodernity – whilst highlighting the geo-spatial limits to accumulation imposed by our planet. However this landmark publication, author Robert Hassan argues, did not address the arrival of digital technology, the quantum leap represented by the move from an analogue world to a digital economy and the rapid creation of a global networked society. Considering first the contexts of 1989 and Harvey’s work, then the idea of humans as analogue beings he argues this arising new human condition of digitality leads to alienation not only from technology but also the environment. This condition he suggests, is not an ideology of time and space but a reality stressing that Harvey’s time-space compression takes on new features including those of ‘outward’ and ‘inward’ globalisation and the commodification of all spheres of existence. Lastly the author considers culture’s role drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s theories to make the case for a post-modern Marxism attuned to the most significant issue of our age. Stimulating and theoretically wide-ranging The Condition of Digitality recognises post-modernity’s radical new form as a reality and the urgent need to assert more democratic control over digitality.

This book is a reference guide for healthcare executives and technology providers involved in the ongoing digital transformation of the healthcare sector. The book focuses specifically on the challenges and opportunities for health systems in their journey toward a digital future. It draws from proprietary research and public information, along with interviews with over one hundred and fifty executives in leading health systems such as Cleveland Clinic, Partners, Mayo, Kaiser, and Intermountain as well as numerous technology and retail providers. The authors explore the important role of technology and that of EHR systems, digital health innovators, and big tech firms in the ongoing digital transformation of healthcare. Importantly, the book draws on the accelerated learnings of the healthcare sector during the COVID-19 pandemic in their digital transformation efforts to adopt telehealth and virtual care models. Features of this book: Provides an understanding of the current state of digital transformation and the factors influencing the ongoing transformation of the healthcare sector. Includes interviews with executives from leading health systems. Describes the important role of emerging technologies; EHR systems, digital health innovators, and more. Includes case studies from innovative health organizations. Provides a set of templates and frameworks for developing and implementing a digital roadmap. Based on best practices from real-life examples, the book is a guidebook that provides a set of templates and frameworks for digital transformation practitioners in healthcare.