(A day's worth of geolocated instagram posts in Baltimore: August 24, 2018) The digital world presupposes a binary logic of connection and disconnection, one that decomposes into haves and have-nots. Moreover, this binary logic follows on burgeoning urban inequalities in a neo-liberal age, and growing chasms in wealth and opportunity only seem to confirm the either/or logic of digital capitalism. In cities, it echoes in the dreadful calculus of gentrification and abandonment, capital investment and disinvestment, inclusion and exclusion. But is dis-connection only an absence? In this paper, I explore absences and disconnections in social media and in urban networks as latencies visible through an application of structural holes, triadic closure, structural equivalence and other social network tools to digital media in cities. This work is inspired both by Ernst Bloch’s “Not-Yet” and his insights that even forms of social life thoroughly imbricated in capitalism...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.