All Tomorrow's Cultures

From Wikimedia Commons   As I complete this essay, the quarantine imposed on Baltimore stretches into its second month, and I continue teaching online amid terror and despair.   Blog posts and newspaper articles forecast a new era of education in the age of social distancing, a new kind of virtual conference in the absence of travel, and new research without the face-to-face interactions that have heretofore been the bread-and-butter of ethnographic fieldwork.  All of these may be prognostications, but they are not, I would submit, really about the future.  Instead, each “future” describes a present--online education, virtual meetings, digital anthropology.  None of them are really “new” at all.  Just the opposite, they are part of a process of what Escobar (echoing Tony Fry) describes as “the systematic destruction of possible futures by the structured unsustainability of modernity” (Escobar 2018: 117).  H...

Wired magazine - mostly hagiographies of silicon valley entrepreneurs - capitalist porn - vague reassurances for the future from the uber-wealthy.  500 dollar headphones.   The Senior Associate Editor Jason Kehe was "weary with dystopian prediction of nefarious robots taking jobs from humans," so he challenged seven sf writers to "imagine a world in which the gig economy and automation have redefined the daily grind" (7).   The results?  A collection of stories--"T he Next25 Years: What'll We Do? "--from a stellar group of writers: Laurie Penny, Ken Liu, Charles Yu, Charlie Janes Anders, Nisi Shawl, Adam Rogers and Martha Wells.  And only one killer robot (from Martha Wells) which, to be fair, isn’t killing anyone.   But there's still much here that is dystopian.   But from the next 25 years?   Of course, these aren't futurist prognostications; like any good sf, they’re descriptions of our present--dystopian enough.  Or, a...

Please check out this provocative collection of papers at cultural anthropology.  Edited by Ryan Anderson, Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy and Jeremy Trombley (and including my own short commentary), the essays speak to the importance of SF to our imagining of alternatives.   

On this day devoted (by some) to a genre fiction, my thoughts have turned to dystopia and utopia--these are not, however, co-extensive with SF, but see Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future for a utopia-centric understanding of the field.  When I look around at events in the U.S., it is hard not to center on the imminence of dystopia: state terror, totalitarianism, white supremacy.  But, I am reminded of Ernst Bloch: even in the midst of dystopian actualization, there are utopian potentialities, and the challenge for my scholarship and teaching in the new year is to mine the present for these tendrils of utopia, and to utilize those for an everyday practice of SF that looks to the present as the source of a more just, more equitable society that allows people to pursue their lives without structural inequalities and environmental injustice.

--> (the Wow! signal, visualized by Benjamin Crowell, from Wikimedia) In a few days, many anthropologists will attend the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.   For several days, they will track back and forth to airless, windowless rooms that exist in a strange non-place and non-time: a conference space replete with kitschy designs, cheap gilding, stentorian carpeting that suggests transit lounges and casinos at any time from the 1970s to the 1990s.   But, given the growing horror just outside these conference-room bunkers—the growing crypto-fascism from the authoritarian government, almost-certain ecological apocalypse, economic and political collapse—it’s doubly important to look to the future as the anticipation of hope, of fear and, importantly, of radical difference and change.   And this is what has happened.   This year, there are an unprecedented number of papers and panels exploring the contours...

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...