From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we are now living in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War. Drawing on theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Carl Schmitt, Bernard Stiegler and Paul Virilio this collection makes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies, as they relate to the arts, society and culture.

Examining the persistence of the Cold War’s massive restructuring of our lifeworld, this fascinating collection provides a series of incisive case studies that explores key sites of interaction between politics, technoscience and various modalities of cultural production since the mid-twentieth century. Taken together, these interlinked microhistories provide both a powerful demonstration of the book’s central thesis regarding the Cold War – the degree to which, even ‘after’, we continue to live within it – and an important resource for the challenge of thinking beyond its legacies. -- Mark Dorrian, Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh

John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Westminster. He has published widely on American cultural politics and intellectual history in relation to literature, art and visual culture. Books include Landscape as Weapon: Cultures of Exhaustion and Refusal (2021), Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde (co-authored with Ryan Bishop, 2020), and Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American Literature (2009). Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics and Co-director of the research group Archaeologies of Media and Technology at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He co-edits the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP), and is a series editor for Technicities (Edinburgh University Press) and Cultural Politics (Duke UP).