I am interested in this class in exploring screen media and political economy in the neo-liberal era beginning in the 1970s and extending to the current mutations of neo-liberalism and new forms of fascism. I mean the and above principally in two ways: 1) as a history of the economies of screen media (as experiences and objects) and related policy frameworks from the corporate reconstruction of Hollywood beginning in the 1970s to the emergence of new forms of digital networked media beginning in the 1990s and expanding thereafter when it becomes “social,” mobile and convergent across filmic, televisual, and computer screens. 2) as a history of the ways screen media has been shaped and used to facilitate and sustain the political and economic principles and practices of advanced, de-regulated, capital integral to the accelerated globalization and new imperialism of the neo-liberal era and culminating in the surveillance capitalism currently fundamental to digital media. Our explorations will include watching screen media and new media forms and objects produced in the service of these agendas; reading primary materials about screen media (e.g. governmental policy documents shaping media ownership; the place of screen media in global trade agreements; the lobbying, economic plans, and records of corporate media entities from film studios to Google/YouTube); and reading selected secondary scholarly materials exploring political, economic, and media histories across this period. Capital Screens, then, pursues a genealogy of our current configuration of media and political economy, focusing in particular on the ways in which screen media has been used to sustain exploitative political and economic practices that have been deeply damaging to people around the world and to shared environments. Our explorations will focus principally (but not solely) on the Global North and developments in media and communicative technology emerging from what was the centre of the global capitalist system. Reading will encompass global political, economic and cultural history across the period marked by … the rise of a neo-liberal global order championing “free” markets and limited governmental regulation … the expansion of financialization and informational economies (predicated on computation) … the end of the Cold War and re-emergence of a multi-polar world marked by state and intra-state conflict … China’s turn to capital and its rise to global super-power … the birth of the Internet, the smart-phone, and social media … and the messy and uncertain fracturing of the neo-liberal project amid the return of fascism and accelerating planetary emergencies, propelled by new media practices …  Our task, then, is to understand the place and role of media in the political economy of the modern world. It is an expansive one. Accordingly, we shall have to read and watch widely and be relentlessly erudite and curious. You can find useful overviews, and insights, in the following materials. Ones in bold are particularly recommended. Here about the deep history and structures of capitalist economies: Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1,1867 (London: Penguin, 1990), though it is easier to watch David Harvey’s lectures on Capital available here https://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/ or read Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital: The Complete Edition, London, Verso, 2018); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994); David Harvey, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (Oxford University Press, 2017). Here about the specific histories and formation and practices of neo-liberalism: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). Here about global political and economic history: Perry Anderson,“Imperium,” New Left Review, 83 (2013); Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso, 2013); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991(London: Abacus, 1994); Jeffrey A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: WW. Norton, 2006); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2006). Here about useful conceptual and methodological practices: David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (London: Sage, 2012), 35-63; Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication (London: Sage, 2009). Here some useful documentaries that traverse some of this expansive history available online: The Shock Doctrine (Matt Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom, UK, 2009); Bitter Lake (Adam Curtis, UK, 2015); HyperNormalisation (Adam Curtis, UK, 2016); The Corporation (Big Media, Canada, 2004); Inside Job (dir. Charles Ferguson, Sony, USA, 2010); The Spiders Web (Michael Oswald, UK, 2018).