All Tomorrow's Cultures

We all know we live in a network society. But what does that mean? And what does knowing that mean for networked society? In his latest novel, This Is Not a Game (Orbit Books, 2009), Williams explores several themes, among them massive alternate reality games (ARG) and global capitalism, all in the context of the well-known "small world" thesis--the idea (pioneered by Stanley Milgram, among many others) that all of us our connected to each other along short chains of acquaintances. There have been other novels exploring the "six degrees of separation" idea, of course, but this is the Web 2.0 release--think David Lodge's Small World with more computing power and less spleen. In Williams's novel, four friends who gamed together at Caltech--Dagmar, Charlie, Austin and BJ--find their futures revolving around a massive alternate reality game called The Long Night of Briana Hall (or, alternatively, Motel Room Blues). The details of the game itself are somewh...

I have often suggested that China Mieville is the best new writer of anthropological science fiction, although appending the word "anthropological" to his stuff suggests the extent to which anthropology has changed in the time since the concept was coined in the 1960's. (Although, see a March 2009 interview Mieville did with Ursula K. Le Guin (posted on her website in the MP3s section)). Mieville's Bachelor's degree is in social anthropology (at Cambridge), and reading King Rat or Perdido Street Station makes me think of Marilyn Strathern's work, with a thick dose of Donna Haraway: lots of hybridity, fecund sites of emergence of new forms of life that combine biological and machinic into fantastic topologies, all shot through with a sense of postcolonial theory and a strong grounding in Marxism. Chad Oliver (my favorite anthropological science fiction ancestor) would, I think, not really have liked his stuff, and I'm not even sure that Mieville himself...

My own entry into anticipatory anthropology started with my dissertation work, research that forms the basis for my forthcoming book, Library of Walls: Contradictions of Information Society at the Library of Congress. In the 1990s, the Library of Congress was just beginning its “National Digital Library” program, involving, among other things, the large-scale digitization of multimedia collections and their placement online. This was a technically formidable project, but it also served to telescope the hopes and fears of Library staff and users at the Library for the future. Examining my informant’s narratives about what the coming “digital library” would mean for their work and research revealed a great deal of ambivalence about both the project’s viability and its relationship to information society in general. But these did not simply fall into neatly contained categories of “computopian” and “computropian” (these are David Hakken’s terms), optimistic technophile and sullen Luddi...

Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney’s hollowed eyes. “It’s all going to change, Yamazaki. We’re coming up on the mother or all nodal points. I can see it, now. It’s all going to change. (William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties, 1999, p. 4) Two of William Gibson’s science fiction novels—Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties —feature Colin Laney, a online researcher whose particular talents allow him to identify networks on the cusp of becoming, the “nodal points” where people, ideas and technologies from disparate corners of the globe come together in surprising, paradigm-shattering ways. Gibson’s networks are the speculative shadows of the more quotidian networks capitalized on by entrepreneurs of computer mediated social networking, each of whom attempts to cash in on the “network” as an object to be constructed, maintained. And yet, as the Gibson quote suggests, “ne...

How many books are there (in anthropology and elsewhere) describing/advocating/conjuring up "post-socialism"? I'm looking at one right now entitled, appropriately enough, "Post-Socialism" by Maruska Svasek ( Berghahn Books , 2006). But, as lay-offs continue and plans to nationalize industries multiply, where are the texts on "post-capitalism"? I don't know about you, but it's sent me scurrying to my bookshelf to re-read my Kim Stanley Robinson! For most, "post-capitalism" refers to a miscellaneous theories for either "next" stages (a la Drucker), or alternatives to corporate capitalism (like various tracts on "participatory" economies). But perhaps the more anthropological take on this would be an economy of "shreds and patches" (to commit unspeakable violence to Robert Lowie) made up of the residue of dominant capitalism together with a thousand heterogeneous practices that make up the barely sublimate...

I just finished reading Ben Bova's Mars Life , largely because of its enigmatic dedication to the former polygenist, Carleton S. Coon. Coon was the last of a long, if disgraced, line of anthropologists at Harvard who promoted the "American school"--the idea that races evolved separately. Needless to say, these theories, long superseded by data in population genetics, were utilized to justify any number of racist policies, including (but not just limited to) slavery in the US and apartheid in South Africa. The anthropologist in Bova's novel, Carter Carleton, seems to embody what I imagine Coon to have been like--curmudgeony and atavistic (he, of course, may not have been). Pace the general characterization of anthropologists in fiction, he's a sexual brute; falsely accused of rape on Earth, he is nevertheless aggressive in his attempts to bed women he meets on Mars--the male version of the sexualized female anthropologist stereotype based on Margaret Mead. Thoroug...

As the Python sketch said long, long ago: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" By definition, future forms and practices will be unexpected, i.e., inexplicable from our perspective now. One reason--technologies, behaviors, ideas, social relationships will combine in unforeseen ways and result in some novel assemblage. This semester, we're on the trails of these sites of emergence in my "information age cultures" class as we plumb the depths of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in East Asia. By looking at the flow of new technologies and concomitant social practices in Korea, Japan and China, we can, perhaps, tease out (yet not predict) the emergence of new forms in the U.S. It's not that U.S. practice will ineluctably follow on the tails of East Asia (although this has often been the case), it's that those different social and cultural perspectives suggest the possibility of future differences here . . . Anyway: check out our messy, ...