Not all forms of power announce themselves. Some move quietly, shaping how we feel, act and inhabit the world. Increasingly, the logic of software transforms the conditions of participation, embedding control into interfaces, automating governance through terms and conditions, and configuring compliance through algorithmic sorting, behavioural prediction and the continuous management of visibility. Are You a Software Update? brings together seven authors to examine the intensifying form of totalitarianism grounded in the quiet background logic of contemporary technology.

𝗔𝗹𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗼 𝗧𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗼, 𝗔𝗹𝗲𝘅 𝗤𝘂𝗶𝗰𝗵𝗼, 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗮 𝗢’ 𝗠𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗵𝘂́, 𝗡𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗮 𝗧𝗮𝗳𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗲, 𝗧𝗲𝗴𝗮 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 & 𝗦𝗮𝗺 𝗟𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗲 and 𝗪𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗺 𝗭. 𝗔𝗹𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶 explore how infrastructures built for scale, extraction and control have come to embody this totalising logic. They show how platforms stabilise sentiment, how images perform order and how data becomes the medium through which consent is manufactured and dissent is neutralised. Their essays reveal a world governed by calibration – a fascist tendency expressed through the everyday management of attention, emotion and presence.