Miamification

Book excerpt: Strange how many déjà vus you have here. How might we conceive of comradeship with a present that is increasingly predetermined by algorithms and governed by techno-politics? Armen Avanessian chronicles his stay in Miami as an experiment in writing about our times of individual optimization and digitization. An inventory of the self in the second person—and a philosopher's reflections in the infinity pool of the art world—this book reckons with a new time complex as well as the aesthetics and infrastructures of the contemporary. Can we advance from conditions of financial feudalism and climate change to a progressive poetics of the digital? The city of tropical noir becomes a case study for a geopolitics and economics of the future—Miami vision, Miami vacation, Miami fiction, Miamification.