Book Launch: Are You a Software Update?
Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana and Newspeak House invite the London public to the book launch of Are You a Software Update? with Nora O’Murchú & Alex Quicho, moderated by Guy Mackinnon-Little.
Not all forms of power announce themselves. Some move quietly, shaping how we feel, act and inhabit the world. Increasingly, the logic of software reshapes participation by distributing control across interfaces and automating governance through the systems that sort, guide, and render us visible. Are You a Software Update? brings together seven authors to examine the intensifying form of totalitarianism grounded in the quiet background logic of contemporary technology.
Alberto Toscano, Alex Quicho, Nora O’ Murchú, Noura Tafeche, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne, and Wassim Z. Alsindi explore how infrastructures built for scale, extraction and control have come to embody this totalising logic. They show how platforms stabilise sentiment, how images perform order and how data becomes the medium through which consent is manufactured and dissent is neutralised. Their essays reveal a world governed by calibration – a fascist tendency expressed through the everyday management of attention, emotion and presence.
Preview | EN | 10,5 x 16,7 cm | 192 pp | BW | soft cover | 2025
Copies of the book will be available at a discounted price during the event: standard price: €20 £17.4, at the event: €17 £14.9
Given the urgency of the topics covered and in order to ensure the widest possible circulation, the editors and publisher have decided to release the following essays as free PDFs:
They Build to Dominate, or Fascism in the Age of Its Digital Reproducibility by Alberto Toscano
Girl Intelligence by Alex Quicho
The Kawayoku Tales: Aestheticisation of Violence in Military, Gaming, Social Media Cultures and Other Stories by Noura Tafeche