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Jocelyn Wills
McGill-Queen's University Press

Tug of War: Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting, and the Rise of the Security State Volume 242

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AuthorJocelyn Wills
PublisherMcGill-Queen's University Press
PublishedAug 21 2017
Book FormatHardcover
ISBN-139780773550476
Dimensions9.1 X 6.1 X 1.6 inches
Weight 1.95 pounds
BISAC
CategoriesPolitical Science > Security (National & International)
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

Selling Earth observation satellites on their abilities to predict and limit adverse environmental change, politicians, business leaders, the media, and technology enthusiasts have spent sixty years arguing that space exploration can create a more peaceful, prosperous world. Capitalist states have also socialized the risk and privatized the profits of the commercial space industry by convincing taxpayers to fund surveillance technologies as necessary components of sovereignty, freedom, and democracy. Jocelyn Wills's Tug of War reminds us that colonizing the cosmos has not only accelerated the arms race but also encouraged government contractors to compete for the military and commercial spoils of surveillance. Although Canadians prefer to celebrate their role as purveyors of peaceful space applications, Canada has played a pivotal part in the expansion of neoliberal policies and surveillance networks that now encircle the globe, primarily as a political ally of the United States and component supplier for its military-industrial complex. Tracing the forty-five-year history of Canada's largest space company ? MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) ? through the lens of surveillance studies and a trove of oral history transcripts, government documents, trade journals, and other sources, Wills places capitalism's imperial ambitions squarely at the centre of Canada-US relations and the privatization of the Canadian political economy. Tug of War confronts the mythic lure of technological progress and the ways in which those who profess little interest in war rationalize their leap into military contracting by avoiding the moral and political implications of their work.

Author Bio

A Tow Professor of History and Director of American Studies, Jocelyn Wills zig-zagged her way to New York from Vancouver, British Columbia, via Texas, Minnesota, and the many dotted roads that connect the contiguous United States with Canada and Mexico.

Along the way, she encountered both dazzling diversity and disturbing disparities. These realities inform all of her research and teaching interests.

Her most recent book, Tug of War: Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting, and the Rise of the Security State (2017), lifts the veil on a corporate world girded by powerful forces at the nexus of state, capital, and geopolitical power games, revealing the ways in which the neoliberal project turned satellites into a multi-billion-dollar commodity and outer space into a competitive, militarized zone.

Her current research/book projects focus on American boom-and-bust and the everyday experiences of workers, consumers, and small-business operators in post-Civil War Brooklyn.

Source: City University of New York - Brooklyn College

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