A pervasive sense has taken hold that any and all of us are under
suspicion and surveillance, walking on a tightrope, a step away from
erasure of rights or security. Nothing new for many long-targeted
populations, it is now surfacing as a broad social sensibility, ramped
up by environmental crisis and pandemic wreckage. We have come to live
in proliferating dread, even of dread itself.
In this brilliant analysis of the nature, origins, and implications of
this gnawing feeling, David Theo Goldberg exposes tracking-capitalism as
the operating system at the root of dread. In contrast to surveillance,
which requires labor-intensive analysis of people's actions and
communications, tracking strips back to the fundamental mapping of our
movements, networks, and all traces of our digitally mediated lives. A
simultaneous tearing of the social fabric - festering culture wars, the
erosion of truth, even "civil war" itself - frays the seams of the
sociality and solidarity needed to thwart this transformation of people
into harvestable, expendable data.
This searing commentary offers a critical apparatus for interrogating
the politics of our time, arguing that we need not just a politics of
refusal and resistance, but a creative politics to counter the social
life of dread.
