The Message is Murder

Substrates of Computational Capital

By: Jonathan Beller

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eBook | 20 November 2017 | Edition Number 1

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224 Pages

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Written as a wake-up call to the field of media studies, The Message is Murder analyses the violence bound up in the everyday functions of digital media. At its core is the concept of 'computational capital' - the idea that capitalism itself is a computer, turning qualities into quantities, and that the rise of digital culture and technologies under capitalism should be seen as an extension of capitalism's bloody logic.

Engaging with Borges, Turing, Claude Shannon, Hitchcock and Marx, this book tracks computational capital to reveal the lineages of capitalised power as it has restructured representation, consciousness and survival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It argues that the global intensification of inequality relies on the discursive, informatic and screen-mediated production of social difference.

Ultimately The Message is Murder makes the case for recognising media communications across all platforms - books, films, videos, photographs and even language itself - as technologies of political economy, entangled with the social contexts of a capitalism that is inherently racial, gendered and genocidal.

Industry Reviews

'Beller is one of the leading and pioneering theorists of the political economy of attention. This book is extremely pertinent for a readership seeking news ways of understanding contemporary capitalism. Beller has developed an original strategy by placing media archaeology and critical race theory in dialogue with the popularized work of Marshall McLuhan, and also by using Marx and Borges as interlocutors of well-known cyber-theorists such as Turing and Shannon'