And so, it is finally out. So proud (and excited, nervous, and anxious) to announce that our new book, that been in the making the last 3 years (or perhaps the last 20 years, can never be sure about when books begin), is finally out.
Co-authored with Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Nafis Hasan, and with a foreward by Chinmayi Arun, ‘Overload, Creep, Excess: An Internet from India’ is out for open access download and Print on Demand services from the Institute of Network Cultures. Please do share, read, circulate, and join the conversations!
The book tries to provide a techno-social account of the current state of the Internet and some of its biggest challenges in social, cultural, and political organisation, by following a time-line of digital developments in India as in the rest of the world. It is both an historical overview of the different ways in which digital policies and practices have been shaped to create challenges to subjectivity, agency, and citizenship. Three long essays read an archive of the development of the Internet to show both the pivotal moments when certain directions were crafted and also the future spaces where interventions need to be made in order to change those directions.
Publishing with #INC has been on my wish list, and becoming a part of the fantastic legacy that Geert Lovink has built and to be in this wonderful Theory on Demand series is joyful. This is a book that is bound to ruffle feathers because it radically questions the status quo and challenges some non-negotiable principles of Internet governance. But I am still excited that it is out now, and will hopefully add to the much needed debates that are trying to make sense of how we got to where we are!
https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/overload-creep-excess-an-internet-from-india/