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You can order the hardback of Tim Jordan’s Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society from Amazon.com for $60.19, or you can pay $21.98 for the paperback. That the two versions have different prices based on different materialities does not seem remarkable. But you can also “purchase” the book for $20.24 and read it on Kindle or on a computer with the Kindle app. “Purchase” is in quotes because if you choose to access the information that Jordan has authored in this way, you are not actually purchasing the book. You are rather purchasing a license to access the information according to certain terms and conditions set out by the publisher and by Amazon. You are renting access to the information. The fact that in this third case, the same information is presented to you at a radically reduced material cost (no printing), yet you only save $1.74, is a peculiarity of the digital age we have constructed. (There is of course a fourth option here: if you are privileged enough to have access to an academic library, you can read the information at no direct cost by checking out the book.) Information Politics seeks to explain how the same information comes to be available through a variety of means, yet with marked differences in materiality and cost. What are the circumstances that inform information structures and that politicize them in this way?
Jordan’s central tenet is that information is a new site of political struggle, and that to understand political power in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to engage the handling of information. Any theory that seeks to explain exploitation in the twenty-first century must now evaluate information as one of the sites of exploitation. Jordan is clear from the beginning that information is not some new master category that subsumes all other political antagonisms, but rather is one of multiple sites of engagement; he argues that information should be added alongside class, race, gender, and other more established sites of political struggle. Starting with this framework is one of the strengths of the book. Jordan recognizes that political struggle is multiple and takes place across myriad antagonisms, and that isolating one point of conflict allows for a deeper understanding only...