10 December 2021 —  Ephemera Journal

Pasts, presents and futures of critical publishing
anniversary note

Joshua Sperber

It may seem like another world, but it was only a little over a decade ago that scholars were engaged in an energetic debate over the liberatory nature of the internet. Today, as millions of people spend hours a day on Zoom meetings, navigate their children through ‘online learning’, and write work emails late into the night, the notion that the internet was ever going to liberate us from capitalism seems naïve if not farcical. On the contrary, it has been the internet that has allowed, in the most troublesome sense, the world to go on amid ecological, epidemiological, economic, social, and political crises as we are told to wait out a pandemic by eradicating any remaining distance between work and home or public and private while wrecking our backs, necks, eyes, and sense of peace, autonomy, self-knowledge, and control.

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