Manny’s: Book Launch for Not Us Now: Zoë Hitzig in conversation with Jaron Lanier

What are we doing to language and ourselves as we extract more and more material for questionable optimization? What will the appetite of a controlled, controlling public erode from the private? Across a series of siren-like poems and sequences, Not Us Now performs an urgent lyric intervention in the midst of our accumulating raw-data footprints. With equal measures of method and entropy, Hitzig presents the chorus we are hurtling toward, our own voices in the future issuing a plea for a new course.In this event, Hitzig joins technology pioneer and musician, Jaron Lanier, for a reading and conversation about self, subjecthood and meaning-making in the age of the algorithm.

“In Zoë Hitzig’s stunning collection Not Us Now, algorithms are a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Our likes, preferences, and upvotes transform our passions and personalities into products exchanged in commerce. These lyrical poems detangle and interrogate algorithmic structure and power… In poems lush and voracious, Hitzig grants us a language for how these tricky systems work to tether us to one another.”
–Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, author of Negative Money

Zoë Hitzig is the author of two books of poetry, Mezzanine and Not Us Now, winner of the Changes Book Prize. She holds a PhD in economics, and currently serves as poetry editor of The Drift.
Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and writer. He is the author of four books, including Who Owns the Future, and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.