All Tomorrow's Cultures

2015 has been declared the year of the “Internet of Things”, the promised (or threatened) era when our commodities communicate among themselves. But even the most optimistic prognostications cannot conceal deep ambivalences about objects and agency. How do we think about our things when they communicate and act independently of us? How do we frame our relationships with them? How do we articulate distributed intelligence? And how are others imbricated in those relationships? Yet, anthropologists have been asking these questions for some time, and, in this essay, I revisit some ghosts of anthropology's past in order to prompt spectral evocation of these anthropological futures. Through revisiting anthropological fascinations with the nineteenth-century séances, phantasmagoria, commodities and auras, this essay looks to nineteenth-century confusions not only to reflect on the confusions of the present, but also to gesture to possible futures where our lively things might help us cha...

The city is a tangle of temporalities; a privileged time-space where the physics of relativity and lived everyday reality meet.  It is not a mistake that Einstein chose a resolutely "modern" example like the "train thought experiment" to illustrate a relativist understanding of space-time.  Yet it's not that the city is qualitatively different than either earlier, "pre-modern" or non-urban spaces, it's that the city is sine qua non a space where different temporalities are produced .  Indeed, that may be the primary draw of the city, and the reason for its growing popularity--to the point where we are an urban species, so inured to the city's ecologies that we cannot help but think about the "rural" as a series of negative values (cf. Raymond Williams, "The Country and the City").  And in South Korea, a supremely urbanized nation (even in our urbanized world), it is no accident that travel to small towns and provincia...

Children's day (어린이날) is upon us, so the family was off to the neighborhood CGV at 군자역 to see "Avengers: The Age of Ultron."  I'm not a fan, but I consoled myself with the thought that the movie would somehow work into my research on Seoul and science fiction.  And, indeed, it's certainly gratifying to see Avengers battling it out in front of "Kimbap Heaven."  However: without the still, I would have missed it.  For all of the money spent (and for all of the incentives the city of Seoul dished out), there's barely five minutes of Seoul in this film, and that--beside a couple of signs in Korean and an 옥상 텃밭--is of a generic "any city," bits and pieces of Seoul strung together into a non-place. And I was not the only one disappointed.  As Gang Yu-jeong argued in 경향신문: A masterpiece of atmospheric kitsch, the back alleys where the action takes place in the Avengers don't really look that different from the back alleys of Hong Kong...

An eminently sensible article in today's New York Times from Seth Shostak, the Director of SETI and a tireless advocate for our continuing quest to find intelligent life beyond the Earth.  But not just that: he's also been a leader in the continuing discourse of what each of the terms in the acronym "SETI" should mean: what kind of search?  Where?  And what should constitute "intelligence"?  This time, he's weighing in on a debate over actively courting extraterrestrial neighbors by broadcasting transmissions into space.  What should we say?  And shouldn't we be more careful?  Perhaps extraterrestrial intelligence will be less-than-impressed with the ravages that modernity and capitalism have wrought.  Or perhaps they'll see our various weaknesses, and swoop down to attack!  These arguments, Shostak suggests, have more to tell us about contemporary, Hollywood scripts than about the intentions of aliens, and he counters with another, su...

In Korean SF, the Internet has been important from the 1990s, with a lot of writers serializing their work online before landing themselves book contracts.  But the importance of Internet platforms extends beyond print to a variety of multimedia, and I have also been considering webtoon representations of Seoul.  Here are a couple: 1). 일호선 (이은재).  (Line 1).  The usual zombie-love story, with a mysterious plague turning most of Seoul's residents into flesh-eating zombies.  You know the drill. 2). 레테 (Lethe).  강도하.   Imagining the afterlife as existing as a shadow in Seoul's 서촌 neighborhood.

One of my projects in Seoul this year has been collecting representations of the city in Korean science fiction.  Even if we exclude (for the moment) cinema, that still leaves a lot of interesting work that represents the city (and, by default, Seoul).  This project has been immeasurably helped by an incredible resource in Seoul: the Science Fiction a (SF & 판타지 도서관).  Here's what I've been working on in chronological order: 1). 문윤성.  완전사회 (1967).  Yun-seong Mun.  The Perfect Society. 2). 강경옥.  노말 시티 (1993-).  Gyeong-ok Gang. Normal City. 3).  윤태호.  야후 (1999).  Tae-ho Yun.  Yahoo. 4). 배명훈.  타워 (2009).  Myeong-hun Bae.  Tower. 5). 김이환.  절망의 구 (2009).  I-hwan Kim.  The Orb of Despair. 6). 김이환.  동네전쟁 (2011).  I-hwan Kim.  Neighborhood War. I think we can all agree that this is a quirky list, one that is shaped by the interesting history of SF in Ko...

I did this for the American Anthropological Association last month. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A9VDFYemg8