All Tomorrow's Cultures

 I continue to wrestle with the legacy of cybernetics in anthropology - and a future premised on an anthropological bases for the digital.  https://histanthro.org/notes/communication-without-control-macy-conferences/

  What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center , I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the era of AI, and the workarounds they've come up with. The advent of publicly available generative AI platforms was not something people in my field (anthropology) or other faculty in the social sciences and humanities were clamoring for. And yet here we are. This has led to many responses: anguish, certainly, but also ways of incorporating--or at east channeling--the usage of generative AI in the classroom. But what about faculty outside of my university? I used NodeXL to download Reddit data from the "/Professors" subreddit using the keyword "AI." This generated records of about 2500 users posting, commenting or replying for a total of 7000 contributions to the debate. I then grouped the data in clusters of similar postings, and abstracted the top words from each group as indicated by "up-vote" (which fu...

By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754 I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It's the successful colonization of the two minutes between stations--just one among many in regimented lives that have become moments to produce and consume.  Will capitalism ever run out of space to subsume into its extractivist logic? Zeno's paradox of motion describes the impossibility of ever arriving; there is always infinitely divisible space remaining: first 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8. Mathematically, this isn't a paradox at all, but, really, capitalism depends on Zeno's chicanery. There's always a fraction left to exploit. And this goes in both directions. We're used to thinking about capitalism as an expansive system, constantly locating new sources of profit, but it also goes down, to the molecular level and beyond. Finally, capitalism turns to the between.   For Bandak and Janeja (2...

      You’ll see them in film, k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys ( 골목길 ), old restaurants with peeling wallpaper, protagonists drowning their sorrows in tent bars ( 포장마차 ). Sometimes these images are deployed for critical purpose: e.g., the 반지하 (semi-basement) that the Kim family lives in the 2019 film “Parasite.” And sometimes for nostalgia–with multiple documentaries and websites on the “last urban moon village” ( 마지막 달동네 ) of a Korean city. But this is not the Seoul–nor the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea)--that most people inhabit. Over the last 50 years, urban life in South Korea has been transformed in many ways, with successive waves of state-sponsored gentrification that has culminated with “New Town” developments of block upon block of orderly apartment complexes with mall-like commercial strips between them (Chen et al 2019; Song et al 2019). Here, Korea parallels (and anticipates) urban development e...

  There are 3 approaches to generative AI in the classroom: 1) an outright ban on it; 2) a limited use policy that covers certain assignments or parts of assignments, and 3) an open approach that allows students to do what they would. None of these are fool-proof, whatever the intentions of the professor. Ultimately, generative AI are third-party, black-boxed products–more tempting to students, perhaps, than Wikipedia, but also more treacherous. I feel for my colleagues in the humanities attempting to wrest essays from students on Shakespeare or Aristotle: generative AI is all too good at producing a mediocre essay on these subjects. I also understand my colleagues in the computer and information sciences, who utilize these chatbots to help with their instruction.   But with anthropology, there are several caveats. 99.99% of writings on other peoples of the world are drenched in ethnocentrism, colonialism and racism. The internet is awash in complete nonsense about “trib...

Today (April 26, 2024), our book, "Multimodal Methods in Anthropology" is released into the world. Here's a song I've created for the moment using Udio, a text-to-song Generative AI model: https://www.udio.com/songs/m5HMHSZ2exSgEWE7f8AaAr And here's a code for a discount on this book from our publisher, Routledge Books:

In 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new branch of anthropology”: Spiritualism. Based on the explosive growth in seances in Europe and North America, Spiritualism conjured a world beyond the grave where the dead continued to learn and improve themselves while enjoying each’s ghostly society. When the dead deigned to visit the living, it was typically to help and to advise: “this haunting could teach the living how to build a more perfect society in the here-and-now” (Forbes 2016: 445). So, for Wallace, this really was a new direction for the field–an inquiry into the unseen and, simultaneously, into a future that awaited humanity, both in the afterlife and in the perfection of human life on this planet.   To give away the ending, Wallace was not successful in establishing his “new branch of anthropology.” Huxley wasn’t buying it, and other anthropological...