Glossary of Cognitive Activism – For a Not so Distant Future - Warren Neidich

We live in a world of tremendous connectivity and little collectivity, leaving us witness to the diffuse degrading of personal freedoms. The resurgence of racism and sexism, the power of the global art market, the de-emphasis of theory and the humanities in university curricula, and assaults on privacy such as digital profiling are just a few examples of the strategy of normalization and governmentalization in the digital economy. That massive demonstrations against American and British involvement in the Iraq War had no effect is a direct result of our use of archaic forms of resistance to solve twenty-first-century problems. Artist/writer Warren Neidich's thought-provoking and timely Glossary of Cognitive Activism updates the epistemological foundations of resistance. Cognitive capitalism assumes that wealth production is the product of a brain highly attuned to hyper-branded, designed sensibilities. This project considers as antidote the role of diverse aesthetic production in the creation of diverse neural maps and network configurations.