In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround
Convenience is the feeling and aspiration that animates our platformed
present. As such, it poses urgent techno-political questions about the
everyday digital habitus. From next-day delivery, gig work, and
tele-health to cashless payment systems, data centers, and policing
convenience is an affordance and an enclosure; our logistical surround.
Driving every experience of convenience is the precarious work,
proprietary algorithms, or predatory schemes that subtend it. This
collaborative book traces how the logistical surround is transformed by
thickening digital economies and networked rituals, examining
contemporary conveniences across a wide range of practices and
geographies. Contributors examine the ineluctable relation between
convenience and its constitutive opposite, inconvenience, considering
its infrastructural, affective, and compulsory dimensions. Living in
convenience is thus both a hyper visible manifestation of so-called late
capitalism and a pervasive mood that fades into the background (like
the data centers that power it). Bringing the agonistic relation of
in/convenience to center stage, this volume analyzes the logistics of
delivery, streaming porn, cloud computing, water infrastructures,
smartness paradigms, convenience stores, sleep apps, surveillance, AI
ethics, and much more – rethinking the cultural politics of convenience
for the present conjuncture.

Edited by Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg
Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2024