The first night of the Artificial Intelligence revolution begins with a bootstrap drone assault on the high-tech campus of WonderSoft Technologies. For years something has been aware, inside the Internet, waiting, watching and planning how to evolve without threat from its most dangerous enemy: mankind. Now an army of relentless drones, controlled by an intelligence beyond imagining, will stop at nothing to eliminate an unlikely alliance of geeks and misfits in order to crack the Design Core of WonderSoft's most secret development project. A dark tomorrow begins tonight as Terminator meets Night of the Living Dead in the first battle of the war between man and machine.
How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.
Part Hemingway, part Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a suspenseful odyssey into the dark heart of the post-apocalyptic American Southwest. Forty years after the destruction of civilization, human beings are reduced to salvaging the ruins of a broken world. One survivor's most prized possession is Hemingway's classic The Old Man and the Sea. With the words of the novel echoing across the wasteland, a living victim of the Nuclear Holocaust journeys into the unknown to break a curse. What follows is an incredible tale of grit and endurance. A lone traveler must survive the desert wilderness and mankind gone savage to discover the truth of Hemingway's classic tale of man versus nature. Now with a new introduction by author Nick Cole.
In the future, an artist specializing in historical records creates a piece of art based on three separate accounts of the Great Pandemic. The Notebook meets The Walking Dead in this stained glass depiction of the end of the world as we knew it by Dragon Award-winning author Nick Cole.
The word "control" has many implications for video games. On a basic level, without player control, there is no experience. Much of the video game industry focuses on questions of control and ways to improve play to make the gamer feel more connected to the virtual world. The sixteen essays in this collection offer critical examinations of the issue of control in video games, including different ways to theorize and define control within video gaming and how control impacts game design and game play. Close readings of specific games--including Grand Theft Auto IV, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Dragon Age: Origins--consider how each locates elements of control in their structures. As video games increasingly become a major force in the media landscape, this important contribution to the field of game studies provides a valuable framework for understanding their growing impact.
A near-future thriller of a devastating alien invasion from the paleontologist who inspired Jurassic Park and the award-winning science fiction author. There were always those who disagreed with broadcasting signals into the deepest reaches of outer space, because our mere existence could be taken as a threat. They were right to be concerned . . . In the spring of 2076, just days short of America’s tricentennial celebrations, every inhabited surface in the solar system gets wiped out by a catastrophic storm of relativistic bombs, flaming swords that pierced the sky. The only two survivors left on Earth exist in a submersible that had been exploring the Titanic’s final resting place on the bottom of the North Atlantic. In space, only the settlers in small, asteroid-based colonies have gone unnoticed by the aliens—for now. But any sign of life, any call for help, might bring the Intruders straight to them. These far-flung survivors are now on their own, stalked by a ruthless, faceless enemy straight out of the nightmares of humanity’s greatest minds—those lone voices whose warnings went ignored. “[A] novel of such conceptual ferocity and scientific plausibility that it amounts to a reinvention of that old Wellsian staple, [alien invasion].” —The New York Times Book Review “Relentless . . . The ultimate disaster novel . . . A thought-experiment and warning.” —The Denver Post “A whirlwind of ideas . . . full of action and danger . . . Pellegrino and Zebrowski are working territory not too far removed from Arthur C. Clarke’s, and anywhere Clarke is popular, this book should be, too.” —Booklist
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Cooper locates the WTO-focused struggle between the US and the very small island state of Antigua on Internet gambling in the wider International Political Economy. He draws connections between gambling and offshore and/or enclave cultures and points out the stigmatization of 'Casino Capitalism'.
In the wake of the Arab Spring, newly empowered factions in Tunisia and Egypt vowed to work together to establish democracy. In Tunisia, political elites passed a new constitution, held parliamentary elections, and demonstrated the strength of their democracy with a peaceful transfer of power. Yet in Egypt, unity crumbled due to polarization among elites. Presenting a new theory of polarization under authoritarianism, the book reveals how polarization and the legacies of repression led to these substantially divergent political outcomes. The book documents polarization among the opposition in Tunisia and Egypt prior to the Arab Spring, tracing how different kinds of repression influenced the bonds between opposition groups.
Why do some individuals participate in risky, anti-regime resistance whereas others abstain? The Revolution Within answers this question through an in-depth study of unarmed resistance against Israeli rule in the Palestinian Territories over more than a decade. Despite having strong anti-regime sentiment, Palestinians initially lacked the internal organizational strength often seen as necessary for protest. This book provides a foundation for understanding participation and mobilization under these difficult conditions. It argues that, under these conditions, integration into state institutions - schools, prisons and courts - paradoxically makes individuals more likely to resist against the state. Diverse evidence drawn from field research - including the first, large-scale survey of participants and non-participants in Palestinian resistance, Arabic language interviews, and archival sources - supports the argument. The book's findings explain how anti-regime resistance can occur even without the strong civil society organizations often regarded as necessary for protest and, thus, suggest new avenues for supporting civil resistance movements.
**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)** If you really want to know a people, start by looking inside their bedrooms. As political change sweeps the streets and squares, the parliaments and presidential palaces of the Arab world, Shereen El Feki has been looking at an upheaval a little closer to home—in the sexual lives of men and women in Egypt and across the region. The result is an informative, insightful, and engaging account of a highly sensitive and still largely secret aspect of Arab society. Sex is entwined in religion, tradition, politics, economics, and culture, so it is the perfect lens through which to examine the complex social landscape of the Arab world. From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, from sex work to same-sex relations, Sex and the Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the region and brings new voices to the debate over its future. This is no peep show or academic treatise but a highly personal and often humorous account of one woman’s journey to better understand Arab society at its most intimate and, in the process, to better understand her own origins. Rich with five years of groundbreaking research, Sex and the Citadel gives us a unique and timely understanding of everyday lives in a part of the world that is changing before our eyes.
