Theory on Demand #54

In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround

Edited by Joshua Neves and Marc Sternberg

Convenience is the feeling and aspiration that animates our platformed present. As such, it poses urgent techno-political questions about the everyday digital habitus. From next-day delivery, gig work, and tele-health to cashless payment systems, data centers, and policing convenience is an affordance and an enclosure; our logistical surround. Driving every experience of convenience is the precarious work, proprietary algorithms, or predatory schemes that subtend it. This collaborative book traces how the logistical surround is transformed by thickening digital economies and networked rituals, examining contemporary conveniences across a wide range of practices and geographies. Contributors examine the ineluctable relation between convenience and its constitutive opposite, inconvenience, considering its infrastructural, affective, and compulsory dimensions. Living in convenience is thus both a hyper visible manifestation of so-called late capitalism and a pervasive mood that fades into the background (like the data centers that power it). Bringing the agonistic relation of in/convenience to center stage, this volume analyzes the logistics of delivery, streaming porn, cloud computing, water infrastructures, smartness paradigms, convenience stores, sleep apps, surveillance, AI ethics, and much more – rethinking the cultural politics of convenience for the present conjuncture.

Edited by: Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg
Contributors: Darren Byler, Orit Halpern, Armin Beverungen, Mél Hogan, Steven Gonzalez, Tung Hui-Hu, Susanna Paasonen, Neta Alexander, Rahul Mukherjee, Liza Rose Cirolia, Andrea Pollio, Tomasz Hollanek, Maya Indira Ganesh
Cover design: Katja van Stiphout
Design and EPUB development: Salome Berdzenishvili, Tommaso Campagna, Carolina Pinto

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2024
ISBN: 9789083412559

Contact: Institute of Network Cultures 
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

Order a copy or download this publication at:
www.networkcultures.org/publications

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under grant agreement 788572 (Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe) and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions under grant agreement 840302 (MemoRights – Cultural Memory in LGBT Activism for Rights).

This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/4.0./

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