Ob beim Aufrufen einer Webseite, beim Versenden einer E-Mail oder beim Hochfrequenz-Borsenhandel: Auf ihrem Weg durch die Weiten digitaler Netze durchqueren Bits zahlreiche Knoten, an denen eine Reihe von Mikroentscheidungen getroffen werden. Diese Entscheidungen betreffen den besten Pfad zum Ziel, die Verarbeitungsgeschwindigkeit oder die Prioritat zwischen den ankommenden Paketen. In ihrer vielschichtigen Gestalt bilden solche Mikroentscheidungen eine bislang nur marginal beachtete Dimension von Kontrolle und Uberwachung im 21. Jahrhundert. Sie sind sowohl die kleinste Einheit als auch die...

Be it in the case of opening a website, sending an email, or high-frequency trading, bits and bytes of information have to cross numerous nodes at which micro-decisions are made. These decisions concern the most efficient path through the network, the processing speed, or the priority of incoming data packets. Despite their multifaceted nature, micro-decisions are a dimension of control and surveillance in the twenty-first century that has received little critical attention. They represent the smallest unit and the technical precondition of a contemporary network politics - and of our...

This issue of Limn on "Ebola's Ecologies" examines how the 2014 Ebola outbreak has put the norms, practices, and institutional logics of global health into question, and examines the new assemblages that are being forged in its wake. The contributions focus on various domains of thought and practice that have been implicated in the current outbreak, posing questions such as: What has been learned about the ambitions and the limits of humanitarian medical response? What insights are emerging concerning the contemporary organization of global health security? To what extent have new models of...

Vast accumulations saturate our world: phone calls and emails stored by security agencies; every preference of every individual collected by advertisers; ID numbers, and maybe an iris scan, for every Indian; hundreds of thousands of whole genome sequences; seed banks of all existing plants, and of course, books... all of them. Just what is the purpose of these optimistically total archives, and how are they changing us? This issue of Limn asks authors and artists to consider how these accumulations govern us, where this obsession with totality came from and how we might think differently...