Frankenstein's Legacy: Discursive Thinking in the Economic Paradigm

"Frankenstein's Legacy" provides counter-readings of technographic
representation specific to three conjunctural eras of reflexive modernity. It contextualizes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) through the "dual revolution" (Hobsbawm) of early industrialism and burgeoning institutionalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Next, Alan Turing's seminal paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950) is historicized relative to the emerging socio-economic logics of cold war and post-imperial military-industrial capitalism. Finally, the public announcement of Google's restructuring and rebranding as Alphabet (2015) is analyzed with regard to the company's stake in a concomitant language-cognition driven "A.I. awakening" (Lewis-Kraus, 2016) revolutionizing economies of smart labor and human-machine interaction.