Skip to main content

Hurricane Irene, the 7th Sigma and Cyberpunk Futures

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780312877156-0


Last night, I turned the pages of Steven Gould's 7th Sigma--basically a cyberpunk Western set in the arid hills of New Mexico.  For me, on Day 4 of no power in post-Hurricane Irene Baltimore, the words flickered in the candlelight and the novel seemed entirely appropriate.  In particular, the cyberpunk/steampunk mash-up of pre-industrial technologies with advanced IT--since I was simultaneously checking news and email on an iPhone.  Gould's novel, though, is interesting even if you don't live in a area recovering from a natural disaster.

We do not live in a world where technological and economic development move in lock-step.  In fact, just the opposite--vast swathes of the planet are locked into miserable underdevelopment; other zones explode into hyperdevelopment.  We are used to thinking about a "digital divide" that tracks closely along other forms of inequality: race, class, nationality, ethnicity.  But our everyday experience of technology is not particularly consistent, either.  In my case, legacies of earlier periods of urbanization (electrical wires mounted on poles) have led to the current, Stygian darkness at my house.  But there are lots of other areas of technological dissonance we encounter every day: taking trains, driving, filing papers, mailing letters.  Advertisements suggest that this is only a temporary, temporal anomaly, that we are moving inextricably towards an integration singularity that will sync my family with my entertainment system and my laptop.  But what if it's not?

What if we considered our technological futures as a palimpsest of different temporalities, the past, present and future cobbled together, with newer technologies overwritten on older ones?  There are plenty of people who do this when designing new technologies/ front ends/ use-interfaces for the present.  But what if we jettisoned our myths of technological convergence, those assumptions that these temporal discontinuities will all eventually approach equilibrium?  If it will never be the case that the technologies we might develop will be in perfect sync with the lives and organizations that antedate them, how might that change the ways people imagine technological futures?  Could those legacies move from being considered an obstacle of progress to being exploited in design?  

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Networked, Not Virtual: ethnography when you can't go there

(from our storymap ) In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I've been doing a lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance.  At my uni, very few of us have experience teaching online.  The faculty (generally) aren't especially enthusiastic, and there hasn't really been a lot of institutional support.  So, I wasn't surprised when most of the questions I was fielding took the form of: "I do X in my class.  How can I do X online?"  Not surprised because that's the ideological frame distance education has relied upon: an exact homology between offline- and online teaching, with the physical classroom replaced by the discussion board, the lectures by videos.  But actual online courses (not our band aid efforts to stitch together something in a few days) are structured very differently than their physical counterparts.  The best classes maximize their digital affordances and don’t try to simply "reprodu...
Post a Comment
Read more

SETI: Signs in space/ Enacting space

[From the SETI project, "A Sign in Space" ( https://asignin.space/ )]  “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation  In May, the SETI Institute Artist-in-Residence initiated a piece of collaborative performance–the decoding of an “alien” message, transmitted from the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). “A Sign in Space” is a simulation that enlists ordinary people in the work of “decoding” an alien message–one that you can download yourself. Along the way, SETI has hosted a series of workshops (including one from anthropologist Willi Lempert ) designed to help participants through the decoding process–including hints on avoiding ethnocentric (and anthropocentric) assumptions about what this communication could be and what the intentions of extraterrestrial intelligence might entail.  I am a very enthusiastic SETI advocate, but I wonder if “decoding” is re...
Post a Comment
Read more

AAA Abstract Proposal: Summerland, Otherwise and and the Ghosts of Alternative Futures: the Limits of Multimodality in Anthropology and Spiritualism

  As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and soundscapes join film and text in innovative work that seeks to ground worlding in sensorial engagement and haptic experience. Here, the multimodal can support the emancipatory politics of communities where anthropologists work. But what of the politics of multimodal? Is there anything inherently emancipatory in the engagement with diverse platforms? In order to problematize the multimodal, this paper explores another moment in multimodal evocations of alternative futures–Spiritualism in the late 19th century. While “spirit rapping” may have been the first volley in the explosion of Spiritualist practice, the movement soon incorporated writing, drawing, sounds, photographs and multiple objects into its evocations of a “Beautiful Beyond” that represented not only the afterlife, but the utopian...
Post a Comment
Read more