The telegraph, telephone, and television, not to mention the
Internet and mobile telephony, are all forms of communication that
move information faster than the speed at which objects move. Both
labor and capital and armies and commodities once moved at the same
speed as the information organizing them. Over the last two
centuries, social space has developed a strange folded quality,
where physical space comes more and more to be doubled by a space
of the movement of information. Telesthesia, or perception at a
distance, comes increasingly to characterize how we see and hear
and know the world.

How does the evolution of different communication forms affect
how we can perceive and act? How can the underlying infrastructure
of communication forms be detected in the events of everyday life?
These are the central questions animating this book. McKenzie Wark
first explores relations between metropolitan and peripheral
cultures - or postcolonial relations - with close
attention to the texture of events that can happen when perception
is mediated. He then examines what were once called postmodern
experiences, and how relations of communication create new kinds of
class relations and experiences of everyday life, from 9/11 to
Occupy Wall Street.