David Graeber, Debt and SF

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...

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...

Turing Tests and ChatGPT’s Sleight of Hand

One of the many benchmarks for AI is the “Turing test,” Alan Turing’s adaptation of the “imitation game” where an interrogator must decide which of two respondents is a computer. It is, as many have pointed out, a strangely indirect test, one that depends on the credulity of the human interrogator and the capacity of the machine to deceive (Wooldridge 2020). Will they believe the computer? And will the computer be a good enough liar? As Pantsar (2025) comments, “For the machine to pass the test, it needs to impersonate a human successfully enough to fool the interrogator. But this is puzzling in the wide context of intelligence ascriptions. Why would intelligence be connected to a form of deception?” On the one hand, measuring AI through its deceptive power has the benefit of avoiding the idiocy of attempting to establish a measure of intelligence, a task deeply imbricated in racial eugenics (Bender and Hanna 2025; Wooldridge 2020). On the other, generative AI applicat...

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