Joshua Mostafa

The me that writes the first fragment of a piece is different in significant ways from the me who decides, at some more or less arbitrary point months or years later, that the collection of scrawls and scribbles across multiple notebooks constitutes a first draft, and sets the whole thing aside to mellow and ferment in the cool of a desk drawer

For the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff, the meteoric rise of the tech industry brings with it worrying developments that should worry us – the general public – a lot more than they do, and the fact that most people are blas√© about them is itself a matter of concern. The purpose of her book Surveillance Capitalism is to awaken the reader to a sense of ‘astonishment and outrage’ at Big Tech’s power grab and its effects on society.

‘The idea of world literature, taken as a whole rather than divided into many national or linguistically based literatures, is a paradoxical one. How can we speak of a “literature” that encompasses far too many languages to master in a single lifetime? Does the term refer to the totality of all the literature in the world, or does it imply a project of canonisation—and if so, who gets to decide which works are included? For the purposes of the study of literature, what constitutes the “world”? The last question might seem the easiest to answer: the world is where we live, the ground beneath our feet. But it’s a more slippery concept than that.’

Much of Globes is concerned with questions of scale. Human societies are not static in size. What changes or deformations, Sloterdijk asks, must occur in a society when it grows from one of the smallest units – the tribe or clan in which everyone knows each other – into much a bigger grouping: a city, nation or empire?

Eisenlauer identifies a number of predefined paths into which Facebook channels its users’ activities – status updates, comments, ‘likes’, shares – and suggests that in doing so, Facebook moulds the interactions between people to such an extent that, in any conversation between two of its users, it can be said to comprise a ‘third author’.

The central concept of Against World Literature is the ‘Untranslatable’: a word or other semantic unit that cannot easily be rendered from one language to another, an ‘intransigent nub of meaning that triggers endless translating in response to its resistant singularity’.