Theory on Demand #54
In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround
Edited by Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg

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.
Contributors: Darren Byler, Orit Halpern, Armin Beverungen, Mél Hogan, Steven Gonzalez, Tung Hui-Hu, Susanna Paasonen, Neta Alexander, Rahul Mukherjee, Liza Rose Cirolia, Andrea Pollio, Tomasz Hollanek, Maya Indira Ganesh
Joshua Neves is Associate Professor, Concordia University, and author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy. Marc Steinberg is Professor of Cinema, Concordia University, and author of The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet.
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