Introduction: The Paradoxes and Worries in Contemporary Times

In this introduction, I attempt to map out what I have previously called ‘designer capitalism.’ The way media and technologies in a digitalized world structure existence in what Gilles Deleuze called ‘control societies’ and theorists like Bernard Stiegler continue to develop through an expansive theory of technics, more specifically through his two-volume work on Symbolic Misery. In many respects, this introduction is consonant with Gregory Ulmer’s theorization of ‘electracy,’ which crops up now and again throughout the chapters that follow. Ulmer develops his own ‘electorate transversal,’ a remarkable combination of Spinoza with Nietzsche where pain and pleasure (or sadness and joy) as experiences are theorized within this changed contemporary digitalized world. My emphasis, however, rests with Deleuze and Guattari who play a dominant position throughout this book. In this introduction, I review several important developments to grasp ‘designer capitalism,’ the most prominent being ‘the stack’ by Benjamin Bratton and ‘surveillance capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff. Both help us grasp the power of platform capitalism and the place of Big Data in it. This forms a backdrop to my own involvement with South Korean culture and my concerns with (art) pedagogy, technology, and visual media in the chapters that follow. The last part of this introduction offers a hint of what becomes more and more apparent as the book progresses: the questions that surround the Anthropocene, which is explored in the third part of this book, stated sensationally as ‘the end of the world’ as we know it.