All Tomorrow's Cultures

Lee Young-do's "Concerning the Translation of Kaiwapandom" appeared in an anthology of Korean science fiction, Alternative Dream , in 2007. Like many of his sf contemporaries, Lee's work was first available online--with all the advantages and disadvantages that it implies. That medium may be ideal for the world's most wired nation, but it has also served to limit the foreign, scholarly audience for this work. Translators, after all, are less likely to invest their energies in a medium that is, by definition, shifting and protean. So it's nice when presses like 황금가지 (Hwanggeumgaji) publish these collections of stories. As for translators--well, as you see below, I'm not much of one. But I have tried to give you a sense of this interesting story. You can find another translation of the story at Crossroads , an online journal of science and culture published by the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics. And, in that vein, if you're intereste...

Cory Doctorow should have been an anthropologist; or, rather, he is--a nonce anthropologist of his corner of information society. Doctorow is a veteran activist, best known for his work in electronic media and civil liberties. His technical background, together with his considerable experience in policy and political activism, makes him the ultimate anthropological insider--few writers are as dead-on in their descriptions of geek-dom in general, and his policy writings give his work a level of accessibility that would otherwise be missing. Makers is in many ways the synthesis of his work in science fiction, activism and what might best be described as self-entrepreneurship. As such it is a profoundly reflexive work: Doctorow blogs on boingboing.net about people who re-combine the dross of consumer society into new forms, clever hacks, ironic parodies. Makers extrapolates on these smaller-scale inventions into a description of a new economic system (the 'new work'), as se...

We all know we live in a network society. But what does that mean? And what does knowing that mean for networked society? In his latest novel, This Is Not a Game (Orbit Books, 2009), Williams explores several themes, among them massive alternate reality games (ARG) and global capitalism, all in the context of the well-known "small world" thesis--the idea (pioneered by Stanley Milgram, among many others) that all of us our connected to each other along short chains of acquaintances. There have been other novels exploring the "six degrees of separation" idea, of course, but this is the Web 2.0 release--think David Lodge's Small World with more computing power and less spleen. In Williams's novel, four friends who gamed together at Caltech--Dagmar, Charlie, Austin and BJ--find their futures revolving around a massive alternate reality game called The Long Night of Briana Hall (or, alternatively, Motel Room Blues). The details of the game itself are somewh...

I have often suggested that China Mieville is the best new writer of anthropological science fiction, although appending the word "anthropological" to his stuff suggests the extent to which anthropology has changed in the time since the concept was coined in the 1960's. (Although, see a March 2009 interview Mieville did with Ursula K. Le Guin (posted on her website in the MP3s section)). Mieville's Bachelor's degree is in social anthropology (at Cambridge), and reading King Rat or Perdido Street Station makes me think of Marilyn Strathern's work, with a thick dose of Donna Haraway: lots of hybridity, fecund sites of emergence of new forms of life that combine biological and machinic into fantastic topologies, all shot through with a sense of postcolonial theory and a strong grounding in Marxism. Chad Oliver (my favorite anthropological science fiction ancestor) would, I think, not really have liked his stuff, and I'm not even sure that Mieville himself...

My own entry into anticipatory anthropology started with my dissertation work, research that forms the basis for my forthcoming book, Library of Walls: Contradictions of Information Society at the Library of Congress. In the 1990s, the Library of Congress was just beginning its “National Digital Library” program, involving, among other things, the large-scale digitization of multimedia collections and their placement online. This was a technically formidable project, but it also served to telescope the hopes and fears of Library staff and users at the Library for the future. Examining my informant’s narratives about what the coming “digital library” would mean for their work and research revealed a great deal of ambivalence about both the project’s viability and its relationship to information society in general. But these did not simply fall into neatly contained categories of “computopian” and “computropian” (these are David Hakken’s terms), optimistic technophile and sullen Luddi...

Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney’s hollowed eyes. “It’s all going to change, Yamazaki. We’re coming up on the mother or all nodal points. I can see it, now. It’s all going to change. (William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties, 1999, p. 4) Two of William Gibson’s science fiction novels—Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties —feature Colin Laney, a online researcher whose particular talents allow him to identify networks on the cusp of becoming, the “nodal points” where people, ideas and technologies from disparate corners of the globe come together in surprising, paradigm-shattering ways. Gibson’s networks are the speculative shadows of the more quotidian networks capitalized on by entrepreneurs of computer mediated social networking, each of whom attempts to cash in on the “network” as an object to be constructed, maintained. And yet, as the Gibson quote suggests, “ne...

How many books are there (in anthropology and elsewhere) describing/advocating/conjuring up "post-socialism"? I'm looking at one right now entitled, appropriately enough, "Post-Socialism" by Maruska Svasek ( Berghahn Books , 2006). But, as lay-offs continue and plans to nationalize industries multiply, where are the texts on "post-capitalism"? I don't know about you, but it's sent me scurrying to my bookshelf to re-read my Kim Stanley Robinson! For most, "post-capitalism" refers to a miscellaneous theories for either "next" stages (a la Drucker), or alternatives to corporate capitalism (like various tracts on "participatory" economies). But perhaps the more anthropological take on this would be an economy of "shreds and patches" (to commit unspeakable violence to Robert Lowie) made up of the residue of dominant capitalism together with a thousand heterogeneous practices that make up the barely sublimate...