"Confident, sharp and funny" -  Curtis Brown Publishing

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"The tone is synaesthesic, bizarre and rampaging with curiously absurd yet crystalised clarity of thought by the obscure and exhilarating Ali J. Prince" - Cactus Flower Press

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"Utterly engaging" - district14.com

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"A work of youthcentric, Londoncentric, pure rebellious beat poet joy!" - takeoverpoetry.com

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"A slab of unapologetically mischievous invention, and a brutal commentary on how the most grimy aspects of technology discourage divergent thinking or indeed, any kind of Talmudic reading in which in-depth alternative viewpoints and arguments are embraced.

  The Bible or the works of Shakespeare; even indexes are quick becoming an archaic approach, since search engines can instantly find any word or phrase in a text and, when assisted by artificial intelligence, could perform much the same functions as humans become stupider. The enormous volume of information served up by the Internet makes it an auxiliary brain. Mobile devices expand this into our daily lives, changing how we use our memories, moving beyond the book. 

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The Internet diminishes the multi-layered nature of interpersonal encounters and individuals’ sensual engagement with the world to a few electronically mediated senses. 

Most immediately, we face the dilemma of drowning in data, inundated with ideas, texts, and images that saturate attention, cognition, and imagination. Novelty seeking is among the more dominant of human motivations and the Internet has capitalised on this in every domain.

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If embodiment and enactment, offer us the prospect of a virtual heaven (or hell) without bodies, the experience of virtual reality itself involves forms of embodiment. 

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Nevertheless, the virtual worlds of the Internet, whether abstract and text based or richly decked out in colour and texture like the avatars of Second Life afford more elaborate forms of role playing. In the face of this imaginative freedom and power to reconfigure virtual identities, the forms of social life derived from our physically shared world may come to seem threadbare, confining, or redundant.

Digital Scum is particularly concerned that the condition of always being connected or “tethered” to one's device—and thus having the potential to communicate with parents or friends—undermines young people in developing relatively autonomous selves, able to experience emotions and make decisions without continual feedback and support. 

Increasingly, the Internet is connected to the material world not only at the interface of screen and keyboard (or glasses and gloves of virtuality), and the technologies of robotic extensions and multi-sensory modalities that are on the horizon but also through economic, social, and political consequences. The real world is always present behind the virtual—both in the infrastructure that runs the web and in the very human interests and agencies that run the show.

We surely have a need for real presences, with us in flesh as well as in spirit. 

Ali has fully imagined the ethos of the kids who prowl its back alleys, eventually prowling the real alleys in which the protagonist longs for physical union with unplugged flesh and blood"

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- Erica Nielson, Professor Emeritus and Editor at Surefire Press 

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