is Coordinator of the Research Station at Willem de Kooning Academy and a writer and researcher. The Rotterdam-based philosopher previously worked at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Her latest book is Frictie: Ethiek in tijden van dataïsme (Friction – Ethics in Times of Dataism), published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij, May 2020.
Rasch is a member of the Eurozine Board of Editors since 2019.
If, like Miriam Rasch, you want to resist seamless dataism and de-automate your life, why not take a look at her ‘Tangent’ on the subject. The following recommended reading from the Eurozine archive spans articles from the politics of digitization to poetry’s ability to creatively engage with fragmentation.
Being an idiot might be exactly the subversive tool we need in our communication-obsessed world, suggests Miriam Rasch. In times of heightened surveillance capitalism, non-communication can become active interference. It might not quite be time to throw away your phone, but inefficiency and deceleration could be useful tools.
What does the worship of big data have to do with positivism, and how does friction help create resistance? Philosopher Miriam Rasch talks about her essay in the inaugural episode of Gagarin, the new Eurozine podcast.
Seamless design is an important dogma of dataism. Without unpredictable behaviour, however, there’s no data to retrieve. A wholly predictable future is just a continuous present, a tyranny of choices on offer.
Globalization was supposed to connect people but instead ended up connecting the powerful. Local news is rapidly disappearing, a side-effect of digitalization and the ownership concentration in media markets. In an age of technological changes and political pressure, niche publications and a renaissance of zines lead the quest for new, sustainable models in publishing.
