Times Higher Education summer reads 2017: part one

Tara Brabazon
Professor of cultural studies, Flinders University
I’m not interested in desert island discs. I want books to read through the zombie apocalypse. I need to understand death, work, unemployment, underemployment and violent attacks on the self and society. Digitisation is not a metaphorical axe to a zombie’s head. Instead, the celebration of digitisation results in adding “2.0” to random nouns, as if a number offers an explanation. The two books that are carrying me through the zombie apocalypse are Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism (Polity) and Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming’s Dead Man Working (Zero). Both probe the slithering, creeping collusion between public and private, work and exhaustion, capitalism and death. As cars transform into terrorist devices and public housing explodes into flame through neglectful policies, planning and practices, we require books to understand the loss of agency, the loss of choice and the permanent revolution of fear, confusion and ignorance.