Risk and Hyperconnectivity brings together for the first time three paradigms of work: new risk theory, neoliberalization theory, and connectivity theory, to illuminate how the kaleidoscope of risk events in the opening years of the new century has recharged a neoliberal battlespace of media, economy, and security. Shadowed by broader political and public confusion and ambivalence between dystopic pasts and futures, this book breaks entirely new ground by forcing the key conceptual tropes of different risk paradigms to confront each other to ask: What is the path to a “balance” between individ ... More

Risk and Hyperconnectivity brings together for the first time three paradigms of work: new risk theory, neoliberalization theory, and connectivity theory, to illuminate how the kaleidoscope of risk events in the opening years of the new century has recharged a neoliberal battlespace of media, economy, and security. Shadowed by broader political and public confusion and ambivalence between dystopic pasts and futures, this book breaks entirely new ground by forcing the key conceptual tropes of different risk paradigms to confront each other to ask: What is the path to a “balance” between individual privacy and state (or corporate) security? Is hyperconnectivity itself the new risk condition of our time? How does memory both assuage and exacerbate citizen insecurity and cultures of risk, and legitimize neoliberal governance? Hyperconnectivity and its neoliberal promise of hyper-abundance (of information, data, knowledge) both perpetuate and disguise traditional scarcities and inequalities that economists take as foundational. At the same time it layers and infects new risks within marketplaces and ecologies of media and of memory. Through probing a series of risk events that have already contoured the twenty first century, this account shows how both established and emergent media are central in shaping past, present and future horizons of neoliberalism, whilst also propelling wide pressure for its alternatives, ranging from economics students worldwide to potential political leaders cultivated by austerity policies.