All Tomorrow's Cultures

From the conclusion to my contribution on " Social Media " in Wiley's "The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology:" Anthropologists are still coming to terms with social media and its impact on every level of our lives.  No matter what new SNS platforms develop, though, it is certain that social media will continue to be a source of controversy in the field. The reasons for controversy may vary, but they will all pivot on the essential liminality of social media. By definition, it occupies spaces between worlds: between people, between online and offline, between official and unofficial, between private and public, between resistance and accommodation, between horizontality and verticality. For all of these reasons, anthropologists are unlikely to be entirely comfortable with the social media they and their interlocutors utilize, whatever new platforms may develop in the future. But that discomfort can also be a source of strength, one that can help to h...

My review of the tremendously exciting collection of translated South Korean science fiction: Readymade Bodhisattva .  It's the first of its kind in English, and serves as a tremendous introduction to SF that is really quite different than that of neighboring China or Japan. 

The American Anthropological Association/ Canadian Anthropological Society meeting in Vancouver is in November, but the browsable schedule is already out.  As in previous years, I have identified future-oriented or science fiction-oriented panels that I would love to attend (including two I'm on). This may not be a complete list, and I apologize for panels I've missed.  But even this, incomplete as it might be, is an impressive collection of a robust future-orientation in the work of anthropologists.  Thursday, November 21 8:00 AM – 9:45 AM   –   Decolonial Belongings and Futures: Creating Spaces of Belonging thru Epistemic Disobedience - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 7 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM   –   Biofutures - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 122 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM   –   Haunting Toward the Future: Colonial Durabilities and Temporalities - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 13 2:00 PM – 3...

(A day's worth of geolocated instagram posts in Baltimore: August 24, 2018) The digital world presupposes a binary logic of connection and disconnection, one that decomposes into haves and have-nots. Moreover, this binary logic follows on burgeoning urban inequalities in a neo-liberal age, and growing chasms in wealth and opportunity only seem to confirm the either/or logic of digital capitalism.  In cities, it echoes in the dreadful calculus of gentrification and abandonment, capital investment and disinvestment, inclusion and exclusion. But is dis-connection only an absence?  In this paper, I explore absences and disconnections in social media and in urban networks as latencies visible through an application of structural holes, triadic closure, structural equivalence and other social network tools to digital media in cities.  This work is inspired both by Ernst Bloch’s “Not-Yet” and his insights that even forms of social life thoroughly imbricated in capitalism...

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.   

As I have done over the past few years ( 2017 , 2016 ), I returned from AAA2018 and ran some Twitter analytics.  Here's the sociograph I came up with (click on the image to see it in its entirety): The chart represents over 2300 users and over 6400 "edges," which include both mentions and re-tweets.  I've arranged them in groups by their hashtags.  Not surprisingly, "AmAnth2018" is the largest group.  But if you look to the upper right of the graph, you can see other, prominent hashtags, among them "#hautalk" and "#lgbt."  If we rank the top Twitter users by "betweeness centrality" (a measure of the importance of a user in terms of their capacity to bridge parts of the graph), we can see many of the same usual suspects, but also some accounts that have become prominent over the last few weeks: americananthro culanth news4anthros eliseakramer allegra_lab tfstweets omanreagan ...