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Cyber-Marx celebrates 25 years since publication

March 2025

Twenty-five years after publication, Professor Nick Dyer-Witheford’s seminal book Cyber-Marx: Cycles and circuits of struggle in high technology capitalism (1999) remains a foundational text in media and communication studies, taught and cited in around the globe.

As Professor Dyer-Witheford, a prolific critic and author, marked the release of his most recent work, Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis (2025) co-authored with FIMS graduate Alessandra Mularoni, friends and colleagues gathered at the University of Toronto on February 28 to celebrate Cyber-Marx’s quarter-century of influence.

Cyber-Marx@25 was held at the Centre for Culture and Technology in the former Coach House, stomping grounds of media theory giant Marshall McLuhan who founded the centre in 1962. Since McLuhan’s death in 1980, the centre has remained a hub for media studies scholars, hosting special events and McLuhan’s famous Monday Night Seminars. Though the space is cramped and still bears traces of its long-ago life as a garage for coaches and carriages, it was an appropriately symbolic location to celebrate the impact of Cyber-Marx.

Cyber-Marx@25

Participants, including Professor Dyer-Witheford and several FIMS colleagues and alumni, discussed Cyber-Marx today, assessing how central concepts of the book have played out and where things might go in a markedly uncertain future. Many of the key arguments and theories in the book – autonomist Marxism, digital labour and the Internet economy, and platform and surveillance capitalism – have proved prophetic in the light of current global political economic realities, the rise of AI, and dominance of technology companies in our lives and politics. The techno-utopianism of the 1990s seems to be a distant memory, but Dyer-Witheford continues to focus on the radical potentialities of labour and technology.

Nick Dyer-Witheford will retire from his position as a professor at Western University in June 2025, having made critical contributions to both his field of study and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, which he helped to create and build in the late ‘90s.

Other books by Professor Nick Dyer-Witheford:

Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (2003) | Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (2009) | Cyber-Proletariet: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (2015) | Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (2019) | Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (2019) | Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis (2025)