Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Human Programming is an imaginative and incisive account of how US culture—across decades, mediums, and institutions—has given form to dystopian fears of mind control as a way of buttressing a sense of the American self that is even more outlandish in its pretenses to autonomy. From Cold War politics to posthuman technologies, Selisker reconsiders who we think we are by looking closely at the forces that have told us what to do."—Mark Goble, University of California, Berkeley
"Lucid and compellingly conceived, Human Programming contributes much to the growing body of scholarship on postwar American anxieties about human agency and social influence."—Timothy Melley, Miami University
"The American rhetoric around brainwashing, Selisker shows, is inconsistent at the most basic level: it takes for granted that the programmed self is inauthentic, and that the real self is spontaneous and unlearned."—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Scott Selisker offers readers a fascinating new history of American anxieties along the borderland between the machine and the human mind."—New Books Network
"The scope of the book is impressive, and the author’s fusion of media forms and disciplinary approaches is creative and adept."—CHOICE
"Selisker’s history of the human automaton is far reaching and firmly grounded in evidence. His work provides a meaningful contribution to the interactions between culture and political thought, and his research will be of interest to academics with a variety of different research interests. This book has expertly answered the ‘what’; ‘how’; ‘when’ and ‘where’ of human automaton, and has made strong inroads into the ‘why.’"—British Society for Literature and Science
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Enemies of Freedom
1. Uniquely American Symptoms: Cold War Brainwashing and American Exceptionalism
2. Anti-institutional Automatons: New Left Reappropriations of Automatism
3. Human Programming: Computation, Emotion, and the Posthuman Other
4. Cult Programming: Extremism, Narrative, and the Social Science of Cults
5. Fundamentalist Automatons: Representing Terrorist Consciousness in the War on Terror
Conclusion: Automatism and Agency
Notes
Index
