SEAN CUBITT

Sean Cubitt offers a large scale rethinking of theories of mediation by describing the ecological footprint of media He investigates the energy material and space needed to create operate and dispose of electronic devices and shows how changing how we use media is the only solution to planetary devastation

Ecologies of truth in a post-truth era.The problem with Neo-Nazis is not that they dont trust the media but that they trust them too much. White supremacists are absolutely convinced by their supremacy. They distrust technologies and climate change as much as the global poor because, as white Europeans, they believe they are exempt from exploitation. This book argues that the only truths possible in the 21st century are mobile, inventive practices involving everything European models of communication exclude: technologies, nature, and leftover humanity. Tracing histories of their separation, Truth analyzes the struggle between the new dominance of information systems and the sensory worlds it excludes, not least the ancestral wisdom that the West has imprisoned in its technologies. The emergent cybernetics of the 1940s has become the dominant ideology of the 21st century. Truth opposes its division of the world between subjects and objects, signals and noise, emphasizing that there can be no return to some primal Eden of unfettered exchange. Instead, these divisions, which have fundamentally reorganized the commodity form that they inherited, are the historical conditions we must confront. Drawing on a wide range of aesthetic practices, from literature, film, art, music, workplace media, scientific instruments, and animal displays, Truth seeks out ways to create a new commons and a new politics grounded in aesthetic properties of creativity, senses and perception that can no longer be restricted to humans alone.

What is the good lifefor me, for us, for the cosmos?Good is an ecocritical enquiry into ethical and political dimensions of aesthetics. Following Aristotles lead, it starts with ethics as the question concerning what is the good life for me, moving on to politics as the good life for us. Like Aristotle, between ethics and politics it inserts the question of the good life for you and methe question of love. In the endwhich is where we all live todayit goes beyond Aristotles human-centred approach, insisting that the good life cannot be thought or lived without including technologies and ecologies. A truly cosmopolitan politics is a politics of the cosmos. Learning from indigenous cultures, it speaks from and with nature and machines in the form of gods and ancestors. Packed with examples from banking apps to cave art, economic manifestos to cookery, passing through music, painting, poetry, and film, the book evokes critical traditions from across the world to present a lucid and accessible case for decolonial and ecocritical aesthetics.