McKenzie Wark
McKenzie Wark is a professor of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College at The New School for Social Research, in New York. She has published numerous essays of cultural criticism, including The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso, 2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso, 2013), both of which are concerned with the history of the Situationist International (SI) and the cultural and political legacy of its members. She has also studied in depth the social and political changes resulting from the inroads made by the information technologies into everyday life. In her book A Hacker Manifesto (HUP, 2004), for example, she champions the emergence of a new social class, hackers, who are willing and able to combat the privatisation of knowledge in the Internet age. Also notable, along similar lines, is Gamer Theory (HUP, 2007), in which Wark pinpoints videogames as the emergent cultural form of our times. In 2017, she published Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso), an essay in which she uses the works of two science fiction novelists, Alexander Bogdanov and Kim Stanley Robinson, in order to reflect upon the Anthropocene Era and one of its chief threats: climate change. Starting from the alternative worlds imagined by these two writers, she ponders the question of what kind of response is required by the present environmental crisis. Her most recent book is Capital Is Dead (Verso, 2019), in which she analyses the elements that make up the current digital production and power system.
Update: 28 September 2021