All Tomorrow's Cultures

 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/

  Communication without Control: Anthropology and Alternative Models of Information at the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences in Cybernetics   Samuel Gerald Collins Towson University, USA scollins@towson.edu     The characteristics of our digital world—algorithms, virtual reality, AI, cryptocurrency, etc.—were largely formulated during the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953. The concept of reducing the world to flows of information is one of the legacies of these meetings, with all of the alienation and ideological work that “the digital” has perpetrated. Yet there were anthropologists at the Macy Conferences as well; Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson attended every meeting, and recent scholarship (e.g., Geoghegan 2023) has shown how anthropological thought contributed to the formation of our digital world through the reduction of culture and social life to codes and feedback loops. Yet there were also alternative models...

[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...

There's an interesting piece in this year's Nebula Awards Showcase, a lively short story about an alternative future premised on Aztec culture, "The Jaguar House, in Shadow," by Aliette de Bodard.  One of the biggest challenges to those of us trying to imagine and evoke alternative futures is precisely what animates de Bodard's story: can we come up with futures that aren't already colonized by Western modernity?  As she writes (185): Part of the challenge (and what had frustrated me with the earlier attempt) is making sure that "modern" doesn't end up equating "twentieth-century Western culture"; and equally making sure that the Aztec culture doesn't turn out to be an ossified version of what the conquistadors saw. De Bodard struggles with this premise, ultimately sketching a future Tenochtitlan that is at turns archaeological speculation and Aztec steampunk.  Maglev stations, nanotechnology, religion, traditional d...