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The neoliberal, capitalist logics that underpin the world are failing. Everyone is exhausted, and video games are not the relaxation tools they are often marketed as. In Gaming Exhaustion, Rainforest Scully-Blaker frames video games as media technologies that inform and are informed by culture. Through studies of popular titles like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, World of Warcraft, and American Truck Simulator, Scully-Blaker shows that games perpetuate hegemonic logics that deplete and oppress, further driving the fatigue that plagues life under capitalism and maintaining an exhausting status quo. However, he argues, it doesn’t have to be this way. Whether by design or through play, video games can help identify and confront exhaustion and offer models of regenerative play which demand more restful ways of being. Speaking against the systemic conditions that leave people too exhausted to live otherwise, Scully-Blaker demonstrates how the critical, revitalizing potential of play can enable us to take our time before it is taken.

An overview of how graphic designers in India use global platforms.

Digital freelance platforms promise workers flexibility, independence, and access to a global labor market. But what does organizing and positioning oneself in this environment look like? Global Platform Work focuses on the everyday lives of graphic designers in India who use gig platforms to connect to a global client base. Drawing on interviews, observations, and photo diaries, Anna Oechslen describes how important it is for gig workers to constantly put themselves in a positive light, build relationships, and adapt to an ever-changing work environment. In doing so, she formulates gig work as making and sustaining relationships and sheds light on everyday practices that common understandings of work often leave unconsidered.
 

A detailed foray into the material and spatial realities of cloud computing

Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Ali Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.

Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses, Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the growing economies of data extraction.

Breaking down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.

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