Value and slavery, or the longue durée of the analogue-digital distinction

Seb Franklin theorises the analogue and the digital as bundles of concepts, feelings, and attachments whose origins long precede the technical media most commonly associated with them. Beginning from Hari Kunzru’s 2017 novel White Tears, which overtly connects analogue media fetishism to an extractive fascination with racial blackness, I argue through readings of media history, Lacanian and Marxist theory, and black studies that the prevailing notions of analogue and digital emerged from and remain animated by the network of relations that shaped specifically capitalist forms of ‘free’ labor, slavery, and indenture. In so doing, I propose Richard Ligon’s 1657 True and Exact History of Barbados as an exemplary text for a media theory of social form.