The Reticular Society

The Reticular Society theorizes the online colonization of everyday life, diagramming capitalist society’s network form while searching for the means of abolishing it.

As capitalism’s circuits of exploitation and domination invade each dimension of lived reality—integrating, isolating, and impoverishing all of what has been captured—The Reticular Society draws upon the thought of Guy Debord and the Situationist International in order to arm readers with the conceptual and creative artillery needed to tear open holes in our networked world. Each of the book’s chapters sharpens the critical understanding of the waves of calculation and computation which sweep over the present in hopes of contributing to the insurgent project of dismantling and destituting their totalizing grip on life.

Praise

“The Reticular Society is the mutant-kin of The Society of Spectacle. Ian Alan Paul offers a critical manifesto against the cybernetic demand that everything must be connected and separated at the same time, that everyone must be networked and isolated at the same time, and that the global database leaves nothing and no one out. The Reticular Society traces how every entity, every breath, every joy, every revolt, every shard of intimacy, and every savage act of care is being carved into controllable bits and bytes of binary circulation gulags as living currents and currencies. Yet the cleaving and extractive machine that eats our lives, our unaccountable potential, can be unmade by back-alley whispers, holes in border walls, with disturbance signals, in tunnels built by lovers that all together constantly create escape routes of impossible poetics, invisible connections, abolitionist gestures, and an undercommons of the inoperable that sing out beyond the totalitarian digitality of the reticular society.”
—Ricardo Dominguez, cofounder of Electronic Disturbance Theater

“From the interstices of a lived reality orchestrated so that lives can be better subordinated together, Ian Alan Paul delivers an urgent reading for renegotiating what technopolitical enmeshments might entail—and why, and how—when life is provided as a networked service in an overarching concatenated and coordinated capture of all modes of existence. The Reticular Society is also a brilliant piece of literature, operating as a geometric grammatology that marks a milestone in the poetics of contemporary technopolitics. Both generous and generative, it arranges a thick vocabulary to name, address, and twist the front lines and corners of subtle resistance. Comrade Ian gently helps me cultivate, widen, and thicken my hope for the flourishing of a collectivized and dissident digital discomfort beyond the current climate of hostile informatics; they help us focus energies, analytics, words, and practices on the technical imagination of other relational geometries.”
—Jara Rocha, coauthor of Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence and associate member of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest

About the Contributors

Ian Alan Paul is a theorist whose work engages with technopolitics and anarchist thought. They live in Barcelona.

Serene Richards is a lecturer in law at NYU London and affiliated researcher at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, France.

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