Working from within a Marxist intellectual tradition, Kornbluh deconstructs the hegemonic cultural style—our seeming addiction for immediacy, presence, and experience—by probing its formal features and identifying them in particular media practices across five short chapters. But Immediacy is more than diagnosis: It’s a call to intellectual arms on behalf of mediation—the marginalized cultural style that expounds, dislodges, mixes, relates, and develops. Everything, in other words, that the dominant cultural style of immediacy attempts to close off as a possibility. The stakes are high—politically, ethically, and historically.

There’s a general recognition that the pace of our economic and cultural lives is marked by growing expectations of acceleration and instant gratification, whether in the form of gig work and just-in-time supply chains or hot takes and digital streaming. It is the great virtue of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or the Style of too Late Capitalism that she clarifies the way these two tendencies—the economic and the cultural—are mutually linked and reinforcing. She also offers a fresh lens through which to consider how our compulsion for immediacy is also fatally distorting our political life.

There’s a general recognition that the pace of our economic and cultural lives is marked by growing expectations of acceleration and instant gratification, whether in the form of gig work and just-in-time supply chains or hot takes and digital streaming. It is the great virtue of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or the Style of too Late Capitalism that she clarifies the way these two tendencies—the economic and the cultural—are mutually linked and reinforcing. She also offers a fresh lens through which to consider how our compulsion for immediacy is also fatally distorting our political life.

Working from within a Marxist intellectual tradition, Kornbluh