The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value

Locates the deep history of digitality in the development of racial capitalism
Seb Franklin shows how the promises of boundless connection, flexibility, and prosperity that are often associated with digital technologies are grounded in racialized histories of dispossession and exploitation. Vital and far-reaching, The Digitally Disposed reshapes such fundamental concepts as cybernetics, informatics, and digitality.
Drawing beautifully on Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, and anti-racist feminist cultural theory, Seb Franklin offers a bold and rigorous critique of the social and epistemological processes of dispossession and abjection undergirding the informatics of value. This is a significant and powerful intervention, demonstrating the intimate intertwining of digitality and value—two linked modes of abstraction that shape social forms of free, self-possessed personhood only through the enactment of racialized and gendered forms of disposal. Through brilliant readings of the works of Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Samuel Delany, Sondra Perry, and Charles Babbage and extensive original archival research in the history of cybernetics, Franklin carefully tracks and restores what both information theory and dominant digital culture, in their fantasies of pure transmission and frictionless connection, depend on yet disavow: that is, the historical and present material violence of slavery, dispossession, unwaged reproduction, and superfluous populations at the heart of racial capitalism. An indispensable work, a model of critically engaged, synthetic scholarship, and an urgent reminder that ‘other ways of being free’ persist in forging connectivity beyond the informatics of value.
— Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Barnard College, Columbia University