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Of the subcontract or principles of poetic right

Available Formats:

  • Publisher:
    Coach House Books, 2016
    Note: This book was purchased with support from the Government of Canada's Social Development Partnerships Program - Disability Component.

Details:

  • Author: Thurston, Nick
    Contributor: Recorded Books, Inc.; Wershler-Henry, Darren; Wark, Mckenzie
    Date:
    Created
    2016
    Summary:

    Of the Subcontract is a collection of poems about computational capitalism, each of which was written by an underpaid worker subcontracted through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk service. The collection is ordered according to cost-of-production and repurposes metadata about the efficiency of each writer to generate informatic typographic embellishments. Those one hundred poems are braced between two newly commissioned essays; the whole book is threaded with references to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wolfgang von Kempelen and the emerging iconography of cloud living. Of the Subcontract reverses out of the database-driven digital world of new labour pools into poetry's black box: the book. It reduces the poetic imagination to exploited labour and, equally, elevates artificial intelligence to the status of the poetic. In doing so, it explores the all-too-real changes that are reforming every kind of work, each day more quickly, under the surface of life.

    Genre:
    Original Publisher: Toronto, Coach House Books
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9781770564893