Exits to the Posthuman Future

Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory, Professor of Political Science, and the Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (PACTAC) at the University of Victoria. He is the editor with Marilouise Kroker of the internationally acclaimed scholarly, peer-reviewed journal CTheory

• Acknowledgments vii1 Introduction: Trajectories of the Posthuman 1Accelerate 292 The Posthuman Imagination: Neuro-Diversity, Psychic Trauma, and History in the Data Feed 31Drift 473 Code Drift 494 History Drift 605 Archive Drift 806 Screen Drift 907 Media Drift 97Crash: Slow Suicide of Technological Apocalypse 1098 After the Drones 1119 Guardian Liberalism: Rhetoric of the “Just War” 122Crash: Traversal Consciousness 15310 Premonitory Thought: That Fateful Day When Power Abjected Itself 15511 Thinking the Future with Marshall McLuhan: Technologies of Abandonment, Inertia, Disappearance, Substitution 17312 Epilogue: Media Theory in the Data Storm 195Notes 199Index 207

"Kroker’s long-awaited Exits to the Posthuman Future presents us with a much more complex, and definitely more profound, analysis of the emerging posthuman condition. Motivated neither by a nostalgic yearning for what has been left behind nor by an unbridled optimism for what the fully realized technological society will bring, Kroker seeks to draw closer attention to the essentially elusive character of a future shaped by technologies that thrive on the liminal, the uncertain, and the indeterminate."Cultural Politics"With remarkable range and acuity, Arthur Kroker defines the posthuman condition of the twenty-first century as 'drift culture,' exploring its ramifications through genetics, data archives, and a variety of other cultural and technological sites. This is an exciting and crucially important synthesis of recent trends that anyone interested in where we are going should read."N. Katherine Hayles, Duke University "This book, on the thorny, arid issue of the posthuman, turns out to be Arthur Kroker’s most humane, personal, and deeply felt work. It is so vast, dark, mythic and oracular that every haunted page should be read aloud by the ghosts of Nietzsche and McLuhan."Bruce Sterling, The Well "Arthur Kroker is a founding figure of posthuman futural studies. He is philosopher of the vectors of speed, theorist of the live data feed, and thinker of our need to ‘drift’ beyond today’s codes, archives, and screens as post-historical mediators of a self-induced techno- catastrophe. A contemporary tour de force, Kroker’s Exits to the Posthuman Future helps transform our understanding of technopolitics and war, consciousness, and power as theoretical categories and futural practices of disappearance."John Armitage, University of Southampton