Always connect—that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: "There will be no more messages"? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of c...

“Scholarly advice for dark times.” —The New Yorker“Provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company.” —New York Times“Probably philosophy’s only beach read.”—ViceA ‘nihilist’s devotional,’ this collection aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism offer a raw look at the human conditionDark times lie around us and ahead of us, and what better way to survive the coming Apoc...

A collection of the later writings of Arthur Schopenhauer whose “reputation as the bard of pessimism makes him the perfect philosopher for the Covid era” (New York Times).Schopenhauer’s writings tap into the anxieties of our modern, uncertain world—from climate change and mental health crises to the threat of mass extinction.Produced during the last decades of Schopenhauer’s long life, these texts reveal a unique kind of philosophy...

“Everything is sad,” wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human experience, projected onto the world, or is there a gloom attributable to the world itself? Could the universe be forever weeping the “tears of things”?In this series of meditations, Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker explore some of the key “negative affects” – both eternal and emergent – associated with climate change, environmental destruction, and cosmic solitude. In so doing they unearth something...

TechGnosis is a cult classic of media studies that straddles the line between academic discourse and popular culture; it appeals to both those secular and spiritual, to fans of cyberpunk and hacker literature and culture as much as new-thought adherents and spiritual seekersHow does our fascination with technology intersect with the religious imagination? In TechGnosis—a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword—E...

“We’re doomed.” So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Eugene Thacker says, the lowest form of ...

A selection of Repeater authors choose their favourite forgotten horror stories for this new anthology, with each also writing a critical introduction for the story of their choice.A selection of Repeater authors choose their favourite horror stories for this new anthology, with each writing a critical introduction for the story of their choice.Edited by novelist and Repeater publisher Tariq Goddard and "horror philosopher" Eugene Thacker, The Repeater Book...

Bezna 5 makes an ouroboric move of plunging into itself ('Bezna' in Romanian means consistent darkness + diffuse fear). Bezna 5 is darkly glowing dead thinking, cosmic pessimism, hairy autonomy, limbo sighs, horrendous pink volumes, underground nematodes, happy dismemberment, haunting prehumanism, glowing horror, sinister moods, eternal stillness, future plague, idiot nonknowing and news from Cioran:The Book of Delusions (fragments) Emil CioranFollowing the Sigh Nicola Masc...

The network has become the core organizational structure for postmodern politics, culture, and life, replacing the modern era’s hierarchical systems. From peer-to-peer file sharing and massive multiplayer online games to contagion vectors of digital or biological viruses and global affiliations of terrorist organizations, the network form has become so invasive that nearly every aspect of contemporary society can be located within it.Borrowing their title from the hacker term for a...

"Everything is sad," wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human experience, projected onto the world, or is there a gloom attributable to the world itself? Could the universe be forever weeping the "tears of things"?In this series of meditations, Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker explore some of the key "negative affects"—both eternal and emergent—associated with climate change, environmental destruction, and cosmic solitude. In so doing they unearth something so ...

We live an information-soaked existence - information pours into our lives through television, radio, books, and of course, the Internet. Some say we suffer from 'infoglut'. But what is information? The concept of 'information' is a profound one, rooted in mathematics, central to whole branches of science, yet with implications on every aspect of our everyday lives: DNA provides the information to create us; we learn through the information fed to us; we relate to each other through inform...

A guide to well-being from the renowned social psychologist and New York Times –bestselling author of The Art of Loving and Escape from Freedom .Though laptops, smartphones, and TVs have in many ways made life more convenient, they have also disconnected us from the real world. Days are spent going from screen to machine, machine to s...