All Tomorrow's Cultures

I blogged a bit about my multi-agent systems-informed theories for de-centralized convention planning at the World Future Society . . .This, as the American Anthropological Association again prepares to meet at a non-union venue.

Ashis Nandy.  Time Treks: the Uncertain Future of Old and New Despotisms.  NY: Seagull Books , 2008, 228 pp., US$ 34.95 (paperback). It is easy to assume that we have no future.  Not a real one, anyway.  Business and government collude to limit our imagination of the future to a catalog of product releases.  Within the confines of advanced capitalism, the future can only be The Present 2.0.  The alternatives can only be, we’re told, atavistic returns to the “tribe” and to the various parochialisms they imply.  As Fredric Jameson complained a few years ago (2005: 281): The surrender to various forms of market ideology—on the Left, I mean, not to mention everyone else—has been imperceptible but alarmingly universal.  Everyone is now willing to mumble, as though it were an inconsequential concession to in passing to public opinion and current received wisdom (or shared communicational presuppositions), that no society can function efficiently with...

It's pretty hard to imagine a more Gothic city than Baltimore (in the literary sense). You've got the Faulkner-esque kind of gothic with over-grown gardens, crumbling shacks, shambling, sclerotic citizens. And also the northern gothic--shuttered factories, menacing turrets on decrepit mansions, etc. It is no particular wonder why Baltimore is often the preferred mise-en-scene for mystery novels. But it's harder to envision a futuristic Baltimore. The usual urban boosters (e.g., Live Baltimore , The Urbanite ) do their best, but I don't know of any sf novel set in the city--even cyberpunk dystopias of the near future seem to have passed us by. Still, I would like to try to evoke stochastic, interesting futures for my city. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Margaret Mead often theorized about the ingredients of the creative city—the institutions that she thought might stimulate what she called “emergent clusters”. But the point to her analysis—and to what I think today—...