Aksel Kielland - Selected Title Author

What is your book about?

Possessed is an attempt to describe a widely shared experience that is unique to the twenty-first century. More precisely, it’s about the feeling that technology is working its way under our skin and affecting us in ways that we at best only vaguely understand, and over which we have little power to resist. Over the past ten or fifteen years, there has been considerable discussion about how the digital technology that surrounds us in everyday life undermines our ability to concentrate and makes us less present in the moment. In this book, I take that a step further, into a portrayal of how the tech industry’s ideology, worldview, business models, marketing strategies, promises, and threats permeate our language, consciousness, and bodies. And since this is something we experience very much in physical terms, I draw on the imagery of the body horror genre to describe what is happening to us.

What inspired you to write this book?

What motivated me to write the book was, first and foremost, the feeling that the public conversation about digital technology, lapses in concentration, and the tech industry’s influence on society was missing some crucial perspectives and analyses. For a long time, I had been walking around with ideas that were too expansive to fit into the reviews and commentary I write for Morgenbladet, and it gradually became clear that the only way to communicate them to the world was to write a book. In addition, I am (naturally) inspired by the two theorists I use as the backbone of my arguments: Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan and British philosopher and cultural critic Mark Fisher. And (just as naturally), I am also inspired by the radical humanism embedded in the body horror genre’s perspective on the human organism.

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See full presentation of the book here

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