Reports On The Internet Apocalypse

In Reports on the Internet Apocalypse, the third and final installment of the Internet Apocalypse Trilogy, Gladstone, the would-be Internet Messiah, finds himself in exile from America, falsely accused of terrorism and murder. Meanwhile, a government Special Agent is hot on his trail and has joined forces with a first-time Hollywood producer bent on optioning Gladstone’s story for film. When the World Wide Web returns in a highly compromised and commercialized state, possibly due to the efforts of a billionaire presidential candidate, Gladstone and his pursuers must collaborate in an attempt to reclaim a free and open Internet. Reports on the Internet Apocalypse brings to an end the dystopian trilogy that imagines a world forced to face itself in real life.

When the Internet suddenly stops working, society reels from the loss of flowing data and streaming entertainment. Addicts wander the streets talking to themselves in 140 characters or forcing cats to perform tricks for their amusement, while the truly desperate pin their requests for casual encounters on public bulletin boards. The economy tumbles and the government passes the draconian NET Recovery Act. For Gladstone, the Net's disappearance comes particularly hard, following the loss of his wife, leaving his flask of Jamesons and grandfather's fedora as the only comforts in his Brooklyn apartment. But there are rumors that someone in New York is still online. Someone set apart from this new world where Facebook flirters "poke" each other in real life and members of Anonymous trade memes at secret parties. Where a former librarian can sell information as a human search engine and the perverted fulfill their secret fetishes at the blossoming Rule 34 club. With the help of his friends---a blogger and a webcam girl, both now out of work---Gladstone sets off to find the Internet. But is he the right man to save humanity from this Apocalypse? For those of you wondering if you have WiFi right now, Wayne Gladstone's Notes from the Internet Apocalypse examines the question "What is life without the Web?"

A navigational aid to the apocalypse. Steve Beard's Six Concepts for the End of the World mixes scientific research with experimental fiction to produce a manual for the apocalypse. The author examines six disciplines—technology, sociology, geography, psychology, theology and narratology—and for each one creates a fictional scenario that both reflects and energizes the research, all under the guiding light of the philosopher Paul Virilio's theories. This approach allows Beard to create one surprising idea after another: Hollywood viewed as a research and development lab for the end times, a first-person account of a UFO abduction, a blog on the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight 370, a voice-over for an imaginary film by a doomsday cult member. Highly original in both form and content, the book surprises and delights in its scope. The approach is multidisciplinary and multidirectional, and Beard's exploration ranges over many areas and themes, always bringing distinctive insights to bear. Six Concepts for the End of the World is an expertly guided tour through the author's imagination, and toward the end of the world.

Gladstone, the so-called "Internet Messiah," has not only failed to bring back the Web, but his search has landed him in a New York City psychiatric ward. The rest of the world isn't doing so well either, filled with disconnected Internet users still jonesing for a fix, and an increasingly draconian Government, interrogating and detaining anyone deemed a "person of interest" under the NET Recovery Act. For Gladstone, however, finding the Net is less important than heading to Los Angeles to win back his ex-wife. He takes up residence on the couch of his old friend, gossip-blogger Tobey, while trying to rebuild his lost romance. But when Gladstone's old journal account of the Internet Apocalypse goes "paper viral," his newfound celebrity puts him at the forefront of the Internet Reclamation Movement. Soon he is a target for shadowy government agents, and a reluctant collaborator with Anonymous who provides a clue that promises to explain the Internet's disappearance. Full of funny yet cutting social commentary, Agents of the Internet Apocalypse continues the trilogy that imagines a dystopian world without the Web.

The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space offers state-of-the-art overview of contemporary social and cultural research on outer space. International in scope, the thirty-eight contributions by over fifty leading researchers and artists across a variety of disciplines and fields of knowledge, present a range of debates and pose key questions about the crafting of futures in relation to outer space. The Handbook is a call to attend more carefully to engagements with outer space, empirically, affectively, and theoretically, while characterizing current research practices and outlining future research agendas. This recalibration opens profound questions of intersectional politics, race, equity, and environmental justice around the contested topics of space exploration and life off-Earth. Among the many themes included in the volume are the various infrastructures, networks and systems that enable and sustain space exploration; space heritage; the ethics of outer space; social and environmental justice; fundamental debates about life in outer space as it pertains to both astrobiology and SETI; the study of scientific communities; the human body and consciousness; Indigenous astronomical systems of Knowledge; contemporary space art; and ongoing critical interventions to overcome the legacies of colonialism and dismantle hegemonic narratives of outer space.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Internet Technology, ICDCIT 2019, held in Bhubaneswar, India, in January 2019. The 18 full papers and 14 short papers presented together with 5 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The papers present research in three areas: distributed computing, Internet technologies, and societal applications.