LEGER, Marc James. Don’t Network: The Avant Garde after Networks. New York: Minor Compositions, 2018. 360 p.; ill.; 15 x 24 cm.; ill. Black cover with text in white.

“There is something rotten about network society. Although the information economy promises to create new forms of wealth and social cooperation, the real subsumption of labour under post-Fordism has instead produced a social factory of precarious labour and cybernetic surveillance. In this context people have turned to networks as an ersatz solution to social problems. Networks become the agent of history, a technological determinism that in the best-case scenario leads to post-capitalism but at worst leads to new forms of exploitation and inequality. Don’t Network proposes a third option to technocratic biocapitalism and social movement horizontalism, an analysis of the ways in which vanguard politics and avant-garde aesthetics can today challenge the ideologies of the network society” (Publisher)

Includes a notable chapter that offers a critique of Richard Barbrook’s “Class Wargames”. Barbrook used Debord’s used Debord’s Le Jeu de la Guerre (The Game of War) to re-enact and re-think questions of historical and actual class strategy. He went on to publish a book on the subject, and maintains a website at https://www.classwargames.net/. A few copies of Debord’s The Game of War can still be obtained from Atlas Press (https://atlaspress.co.uk/product/alice-becker-ho-guy-debord-a-game-of-war/)

Leger’s book can be accessed in PDF here: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=872