All Tomorrow's Cultures

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...

Sitting on my desk is a book that I page through when I have a moment: Quantum City .  It’s not something I’m going to assign in classes—it’s really a manifesto, with quantum  looking a bit like a brand-name than a serious application of quantum mechanics to urban planning.  But it reminds me how important anthropology has been to thinking about space and time as an indivisible whole embedded in everyday life. Frame from the film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov. Photo courtesy wikicommons If we think of 19 th  century anthropology as the effort to produce time and space as a classificatory grid into which we might slot cultural alterity, then the twentieth century suggested a fairly successful effort to challenge that orthodoxy through a cultural relativism that also occasionally included space/time relativity, the idea, in other words, that space and time form a folded topology in social and cultural life rather than distinct variables in a li...

There's a nice piece on Cory Doctorow by Robert Fletcher in the current issue of Science Fiction Studies (SFS).  It surprised me a little to find it there, since Doctorow is not exactly the sf canon, yet, as I have blogged about here, there is really no better example of the current "structure of feeling" than Doctorow--he's right there, blogging constantly, writing for any magazine that will have him, putting a creative commons license on everything but insisting on the profitability of the whole enterprise.  In short, it would be hard to find a literary figure who does a better job exploring the tensions and contradictions of the neo-liberal, especially when it comes down to the fluidity of information, the role of the state, the constitution of the individual and, in general, the contradictions of a monolithic yet simultaneously superannuated capitalist system.  It's that aspect of his fiction that I find interesting, even when it doesn't quite hold toget...

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...

There's a really interesting (or at least suggestive) story in May's issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction : "Circle," by George Tucker. Oh, it's got plenty of standard SF devices: Billy Black is a Seminole shaman who never seems to get hurt at the cursed construction site he's working on in Miami (a la the "Miami circle"). Eventually, he's hired on to "exorcise" the spirits from the site and, after a couple of complications, everyone profits: the condo complex goes up, complete with the cultural "value-added" of a seminole shaman and Billy can finally buy the plot to his grandfather's grave in order to stop developers from dis-interring his body . . .Kind of a Heinlein-esque-free-market-conquers-all story. But, there's other things afoot here as well . . .The resolution of the story rests on Billy's realization that the "spirit of place" must be given recognition in order to be palliated. But what kind ...