Digital Optimism

Coming Soon

Written by DISCO’s PIs over an intensive five-day Book Jam in summer 2022, Digital Optimism is a timely, provocative, non-linear, and short multimedia book.

Digital Optimism centers black critical theory, disability studies approaches, and digital media theory to shed new light on digital content production and ownership, disinformation and misinformation, and the pandemic. It argues for new paradigms of digital love, a digital mundane for black, disabled, and trans users, algorithmic discrimination, and the need for spaces of collective grieving and digital abundance for those users who built these practices out of necessity and care.

The authors share stories about the "messy joys of co-creating,” ruminations from a science and technology history perspective about how to understand information in an age of mis- and disinformation, an analysis of their parents’ experiences with racism, as well as stories about justice, joy, disability, and where digital technology is taking us.

This book is written in an engaging, irreverent, sometimes exuberant first person and first person plural voice, reflecting the unique circumstances of its authoring as a non-linear text by six full-throated writers and artists. It is meant to be read out of order, and we included a map of hyperlinks to show some pathways readers could use to navigate through the content to suit their own desires and interests. Using this book is like a combination of eavesdropping on the after-panel drinks conversation between scholars whose voices you know from their books, cruising academic Twitter with richer explanations and context, reading an accessibly-written academic article, and looking at a friend’s photostream.