All Tomorrow's Cultures

In early 2026, the South African independent game company, Nyamakop , released " Relooted ," a horizontal, side-scrolling heist game with lots of cutscenes. In this Afrofuturist game, players recover looted artifacts from western museums in order to return them to their rightful owners, along the way learning about the meanings of these objects in a variety of different countries and cultures.       In the screenshot above, players are briefed on Djenne terracottas, objects looted from the Djenne-Djenno archaeological site that date from 250 BCE to 900 CE. Gameplay involves making it past defenses, battling drones, and grabbing the artifacts.  For a relatively modest game released by a heretofore little-known independent game company, Relooted generated a great deal of commentary and playthrough videos on YouTube. Partly because I wanted to try the new "topic analyzer" options on Communalytic, I downloaded 8000 comments from a number of playthrough videos and let ...

  Stuck in the Turing Matrix: Inauthenticity, Deception and the Social Life of AI Samuel Gerald Collins The Turing test may or may not be a valid test of machine intelligence. But in an age of generative AI, the test describes the positions we humans occupy. Judging whether or not something is human or machine produced is an everyday condition for many of us, one that involves taking a spectrum of positions along what the essay describes as a Turing Matrix combining questions of authenticity with questions of deception. Utilizing data from Reddit postings about AI in broad areas of social life, the essay examines positions taken in a Turing Matrix and describes complex negotiations taken by Reddit posters as they strive to make sense of the AI World in which they live. Even though the Turing Test may not tell us much about the achievement of AGI or other benchmarks, it can tell us a great deal about the limitations of human lif...

    The   Statue   of   Liberty   National Monument consists   of   two islands:   Liberty   Island (which hosts the State   of   Liberty ) and Ellis Island, the site   of   the Ellis Island immigration station and an associated hospital complex.   Liberty   Island became a national monument under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ellis Island was included in the site in the 1960s. During its heyday from the late 19th century until its closure in the 1950s, 12 million people were processed on Ellis island, and it is for many the symbol   of   immigration in the United States. The   Statue   of   Liberty   plays a similar role. As Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem, “The New Colossus," proclaims: Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse   of   your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,/I lift my lam...

  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...

  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...

Matt Durington and I had a wonderful time giving a talk at UBC Okanagan. Thanks to Dr. Fiona McDonald and the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab.    Multimodal interrogations video link  

 

An article in the Baltimore Banner by Rona Kobell ( https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/hampton-national-historic-site-east-towson-URF5WGM5TZCAZMJAZBGRU7JYMY/ ) reminded me about the precarious state of knowledge under an authoritarian regime. Will our report on Hampton National Historic Site disappear from the National Park Service site? In all probability, yes - we are, after all, calling out the enslavement and racism that built the United States. I contributed a chapter on the echoes of that enslavement in the formation of contemporary Baltimore County. So, for now, here's the report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17RT9t1iewAvNxYgjaWV2tStaoNLgcxgT/view?usp=sharing    

      CFP: AAA 2025   13 Ghosts of Multimodality: Critiquing, Rejecting and Learning to Live with Multimodality’s Problems Panel Organizer: Samuel Collins (scollins@towson.edu)   (Still from "The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo" (1985)) William Castle was the director and producer of countless horror movies, many of which utilized various “gimmicks”--seats wired to deliver electrical shocks, puppets that appeared from behind the movie screen, props of all kinds. His film “13 Ghosts” (1960) was no exception: the movie recounts the efforts of a family to spend the night in a haunted house and the audience was given special glasses to see the ghosts or make them disappear, an effect (“Illiusion-O”) that critics found a distraction and that did not last into the re-making of the film in 2001. Indeed, many of Castle’s tricks didn’t work as intended: too much voltage to the seats, puppets that people would throw their popcorn at, props that ran far...

 I continue to wrestle with the legacy of cybernetics in anthropology - and a future premised on an anthropological bases for the digital.  https://histanthro.org/notes/communication-without-control-macy-conferences/

  What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center , I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the era of AI, and the workarounds they've come up with. The advent of publicly available generative AI platforms was not something people in my field (anthropology) or other faculty in the social sciences and humanities were clamoring for. And yet here we are. This has led to many responses: anguish, certainly, but also ways of incorporating--or at east channeling--the usage of generative AI in the classroom. But what about faculty outside of my university? I used NodeXL to download Reddit data from the "/Professors" subreddit using the keyword "AI." This generated records of about 2500 users posting, commenting or replying for a total of 7000 contributions to the debate. I then grouped the data in clusters of similar postings, and abstracted the top words from each group as indicated by "up-vote" (which fu...

By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754 I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It's the successful colonization of the two minutes between stations--just one among many in regimented lives that have become moments to produce and consume.  Will capitalism ever run out of space to subsume into its extractivist logic? Zeno's paradox of motion describes the impossibility of ever arriving; there is always infinitely divisible space remaining: first 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8. Mathematically, this isn't a paradox at all, but, really, capitalism depends on Zeno's chicanery. There's always a fraction left to exploit. And this goes in both directions. We're used to thinking about capitalism as an expansive system, constantly locating new sources of profit, but it also goes down, to the molecular level and beyond. Finally, capitalism turns to the between.   For Bandak and Janeja (2...

      You’ll see them in film, k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys ( 골목길 ), old restaurants with peeling wallpaper, protagonists drowning their sorrows in tent bars ( 포장마차 ). Sometimes these images are deployed for critical purpose: e.g., the 반지하 (semi-basement) that the Kim family lives in the 2019 film “Parasite.” And sometimes for nostalgia–with multiple documentaries and websites on the “last urban moon village” ( 마지막 달동네 ) of a Korean city. But this is not the Seoul–nor the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea)--that most people inhabit. Over the last 50 years, urban life in South Korea has been transformed in many ways, with successive waves of state-sponsored gentrification that has culminated with “New Town” developments of block upon block of orderly apartment complexes with mall-like commercial strips between them (Chen et al 2019; Song et al 2019). Here, Korea parallels (and anticipates) urban development e...

  There are 3 approaches to generative AI in the classroom: 1) an outright ban on it; 2) a limited use policy that covers certain assignments or parts of assignments, and 3) an open approach that allows students to do what they would. None of these are fool-proof, whatever the intentions of the professor. Ultimately, generative AI are third-party, black-boxed products–more tempting to students, perhaps, than Wikipedia, but also more treacherous. I feel for my colleagues in the humanities attempting to wrest essays from students on Shakespeare or Aristotle: generative AI is all too good at producing a mediocre essay on these subjects. I also understand my colleagues in the computer and information sciences, who utilize these chatbots to help with their instruction.   But with anthropology, there are several caveats. 99.99% of writings on other peoples of the world are drenched in ethnocentrism, colonialism and racism. The internet is awash in complete nonsense about “trib...