Introduction: After Media 1. A City of Order: The Masterplan 2. Media Urbanism 3. The Pirate Kingdom 4. Death and the Accident. Conclusion: An Information City?
Biography
Ravi Sundaram
"Defining 'pirate modernity' as a non-legal form of digital life, Sundaram describes the web of social, political, and cultural circuits that circulate the new media in the urban landscape. Empirically rich and interpretively ambitious, Pirate Modernity sparkles with brilliant insights on postcolonial urbanism. There is no work like this."
Gyan Prakash, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University, USA
"Ravi Sundaram is the one-stop theorist for uncompromised urban media theory. Ever since our 1996 encounter at 5CyberConf in Madrid, I was struck by his dry descriptions of India's hypermodernity. Beyond good and evil Sundaram theorizes the everyday life of our science fiction age. Follow Sundaram into a grey world, ready to be conceptualized. The dusty electronics of the Indian metropole painted out here prove that we have surpassed linear development models and are entering the age of messy politics. Pirate modernity is our integral reality. It is raw and digital. Vital and illegal. Poor and fast."
Geert Lovink, Dutch-Australian media theorist
"Pirate Modernity is Ravi Sundaram’s sparkling, ambivalent homage to the technological modernity that comes not from the high table of national policy makers and planners but from a new technopolis that now constitutes the underside of everyday life in a city. It is there that the 'visceral' presence of technology, often in the form of seductive technofragments, allows media to shape a whole range of urban experience—from violence, crime and displacement to protest, resistance and new forms of imagination and materiality."
Ashis Nandy, Director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies , Delhi.
