Dread: Facing Futureless Futures

A pervasive sense has taken hold that any and all of us are under suspicion and surveillance, walking on a tightrope, a step away from erasure of rights or security. Nothing new for many long-targeted populations, it is now surfacing as a broad social sensibility, ramped up by environmental crisis and pandemic wreckage. We have come to live in proliferating dread, even of dread itself. In this brilliant analysis of the nature, origins, and implications of this gnawing feeling, David Theo Goldberg exposes tracking-capitalism as the operating system at the root of dread. In contrast to surveillance, which requires labor-intensive analysis of people's actions and communications, tracking strips back to the fundamental mapping of our movements, networks, and all traces of our digitally mediated lives. A simultaneous tearing of the social fabric – festering culture wars, the erosion of truth, even "civil war" itself – frays the seams of the sociality and solidarity needed to thwart this transformation of people into harvestable, expendable data. This searing commentary offers a critical apparatus for interrogating the politics of our time, arguing that we need not just a politics of refusal and resistance, but a creative politics to counter the social life of dread.

Table of Contents:
Preface  1. A World of Dread 2. Sensing Dread 3. Dread’s Operating System 4. Tracking-Capitalism: The Political Economy of Dread 5. Viral Dread 6. Ecoforming Dread 7. Civil War 8. De-Dreading References

About the Author :
David Theo Goldberg is Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Review :
“In this compelling new book, Goldberg brilliantly shows that the technologies we now require to live are depriving us of the social lives required for survival. This searing impasse is at once revealed and countered in this incisive book.” Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence “Incisive, well informed, and theoretically rich, this most illuminating critique of our present enriches, stretches, and challenges our understanding of our potential futures.” Achille Mbembe, author of Necropolitics “Dread is a profoundly insightful book and a fantastic read too.” Sebastian Liao, director of the Institute for Advanced Study at National Taiwan University “Dread covers a complex mélange of affective, intellectual, political, and cultural terror made digestible through select case studies. I thank him for his labours.” Matthew Hughey, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power “Traversing political economy, public health, the tech industry and the environment in its focus of study, and deploying conceptual repertoires from across the human and social sciences in its analytical range, this challenging intervention does not lack ambition. Nor indeed, and despite its subtitle, Facing Futureless Futures, does it lack faith in our ability to forge strategies that might help us to ‘De-Dread’.” Nasar Meer, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power “In this elegant presentation, David Theo Goldberg takes on the ‘dread’ that has become palpable globally in the second decade of the twenty-first century… What Goldberg shows through a range of examples is how those who are marginalized live in terror of being somehow extinguished, those who are relatively within the mainstream (at least economically) become aware of the precarity of their assimilation, and, more suggestively, those who might see themselves as the majority or the norm are not spared either.” Anjali Prabhu, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power