Editorial: 'Go viral or die trying'

Bob Catterall

City, 2015, vol. 19, issue 1, 1-4

Abstract: '[The] globalizing working class is now put into dialogue with what the science historian George Dyson has called the 'universe of self-replicating code,' in an intensifying global meritocracy. That's the playful, retail side of "Go Viral or Die Trying" -- but the harsh, wholesale warehouse side of it is a globalized precariat, downgraded by intensifying, accelerating neoliberalization and put into competition with robotics and the widespread elimination of jobs for human beings, struggling to find an audience, to 'go viral' and have a chance at...something.'-super-1 Is the somewhat sombre figure gazing inwards-outwards from a keyboard in an advertisement placed somewhere along the Delhi-Jaipur Expressway, also to be placed, as authors and scholars are increasingly, within 'a globalized precariat,...struggling to find an audience, to 'go viral' and have a chance at...something'? Is that something a matter of (apparently?) gaining a place within the 'intensifying global meritocracy'? But what is that? Where is that? Is this the nexus between 'the city' and literacy at which we have arrived, the 'cognitive capitalism' in which literacy 'reconstituted through partially automated constellations of quantification and commodification' serves, and is served by, planetary urbanisation? Is this the somewhere where something is found? Is this our scene? These questions arise here through a reading of Elvin Wyly's 'Where is an author?', subsequent discussion with him of this particular image and slogan, 'Go viral or die trying', followed up through the context(s) presented in this issue, beyond these to the historic associations of the slogan, and, beyond that, to 'the human condition' at this point in urban and planetary history.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1008225

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