Scorched Earth : Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World

Refusing the digital world of late capitalism

<b>Selected as one of <i>LitHub'</i>s 38 Favorite Books of 2022</b><br><b>Finalist for the 2022 <i>Big Other</i> Book Award for Nonfiction</b><br><br>In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our 'digital age' is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialization of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. <i>Scorched Earth</i> surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support. This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be instruments of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.