In 2003, the concept of precarity emerged as the central organizing platform for a series of social struggles that would spread across the space of Europe. Four years later, almost as suddenly as the precarity movement appeared, so it would enter into crisis. To understand precarity as a political concept it is necessary to go beyond economistic approaches that see social conditions as determined by the mode of production. Such a move requires us to see Fordism as exception and precarity as the norm. The political concept and practice of translation enables us to frame the precarity of creative labour in a broader historical and geographical perspective, shedding light on its contestation and relation to the concept of the common. Our interest is in the potential for novel forms of connection, subjectivization and political organization. Such processes of translation are themselves inherently precarious, transborder undertakings.

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In this chapter, Lovink and Rossiter argue that the field of media studies has yet to develop a theory of itself. Audience studies investigated fandom and the production of meaning, textual analysis preoccupied itself with signification processes attached to content, and political economy turned its gaze on institutional power. Medium theory, while close to the authors' own interests, still falls short, they argue, because it never changed the dialectic between old and new media or gave the relation a productive twist. Medium theory established a continuum between old and new media without considering how the media form itself gives rise to the production of new concepts. Media studies desperately needs new concept production, the authors argue, based in both online and face‐to‐face collaborative efforts. To develop new concepts, media researchers should begin with some reflexive mediation, examining how they use their object of study in the research methodology itself. From there, Lovink and Rossiter advocate moving the agenda beyond the analysis of visual representation to mobile media, miniaturization, smart technologies, and the integration of media into urban environments.

This article examines the growth over the past decade in the construction of data centres in the Asian region. Also known as colocation centres or server farms, data centres integrate society with an economy whose technical infrastructure is defined by storage, processing and transmission. Less focussed on the scale of the computational city, the territoriality of data is such that in terms of technical operations, labour performance and the materiality of data the locational specificity of ' Asia' is brought into question.Moreover, the capacity of data centres to operate as sovereign entities external to or in conjunction with the state can be understood as a form of infrastructural imperialism. A focus on infrastructure as it bears upon the composition and territorial scope of the state unshackles state formation from classical varieties of political thought and social imaginaries that assume territory and state as tied to the geographic borders of the nation. The article considers the implications of thinking Asia through the infrastructure of data centres, arguing that the territoriality of data contests the territory of sovereign states in Asia and beyond. doi: 10.15307/fcj.29.220.2017 How do the technical operations and infrastructural properties of data centres produce new territorial configurations that depart from and challenge the territorial borders of the nation-state? And what is distinct about such formations within the Asian region? These are the core questions that guide my thinking on digital infrastructures as a novel instantiation of imperial power. This is a power not beholden to the logic of the sovereign state, though it may take on attributes of the state such as the authority to decide and the power to govern economy and space, society and culture. It is a power that may also overlap with policy making and the ideological contours of the state.[1] And while such power may manifest chiefly in metropolitan, urban settings, its computational dimensions lend it an elasticity not reducible to the scale of cities. The pursuit of public-private partnerships, taxation incentives to attract foreign investment, a ready supply of technical expertise and low wage agreements for service labour, relatively stable political systems and generous land concessions are some of the typical arrangements that feature over the past thirty years or so that has seen the conjunction of state and firm in ways frequently 1 aligned with neoliberal governance and economy. To make such associations is also to acknowledge the intersection of ubiquitous media with labour, life and a broad range of economic transactions driven by the transmission of data. Accompanying the transmission of data are hardware operations of processing and storage, all of which take us to the data centre as a key infrastructural site in the spatial and temporal organisation of world economies and routines of daily life.The data centre can be considered imperial insofar as it commands a power to connect agencies and their economic...

The unruly worker, the software glitch, wilful acts of laziness, sabotage and refusal,