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It didn’t have to be this way ⊗ The future is not a solution ⊗ the Intersection

{%  markdown %} This week → It didn’t have to be this way ⊗ The future is not a solution ⊗ the Intersection ⊗ The Metaverse is bad ⊗ A mechanism for growing something enduring ⊗ The state of us

Issues of the newsletter are usually loosely ordered from my most enjoyed read and on down, hoping of course that they all bring something to your thinking. In this one, the first three are ordered as a kind of progression. In the first, William Deresiewicz reviews Graeber and Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity which reassesses human history and comes to the conclusion that we seem to have lost the freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence. Then Laura Forlano assembles a few books about foresight and futures into an argument for the growing need to invent and manifest new futures (we’ve been here before but it’s a really good piece). Finally, the team at Superflux created the short film the Intersection which does exactly that, they imagine a future that both makes us think and proposes a valuable vision.

It didn’t have to be this way

As mentioned above, William Deresiewicz reviews Graeber and Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. It’s a recurring theme here, a fascination with how knowledge changes as we make new discoveries, come up with new methods for research, new technologies to question the past, etc. Deresiewicz takes us on the authors’ whirlwind tour of re-interpretations of history, with the stated goal of debunking the usual narrative where civilization emerges, through steps that can’t be reversed, from hunter-gatherers to today’s Uber-capitalism (see the first quote).

It can be expected that some other interpretations will be presented, that the authors’ ideas will be challenged, but the articles remains an excellent teaser for what seems like a great book, and a number of the examples are ideas that have been slowly emerging as newly discovered and accepted facts.

Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men. […]
[T]hey demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them.{.highlight} […]
[T]he authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. […]
The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity.

The future is not a solution

Laura Forlano explains how the technofuture endorsed by so many in technology ends up also being the default vision broadly accepted and so often left unchallenged. But it is simply a future—albeit one representing powerful forces—and there are ways of imagining different ones, with goals other than the technokleptocrats, including more people, more perspectives, considering varied drivers and goals. It’s possible, needed actually, to formulate pluriversal futures. How about “Black futures? Feminist futures? Queer futures? Trans futures? Crip futures? Working-class futures? Asian futures? Indigenous futures? And multispecies futures?”

Dourish and Bell suggest that perhaps it would be better to acknowledge that the future is already here, full of the kinds of technological problems that we experience every day—moving from the futures portrayed in science fiction to futures full of messiness and frictions.{.highlight} […]
[Devon] Powers argues that trends are “superficially progressive” but inherently “apolitical” or “antipolitical,” in that they “envision a future that keeps the fundamental structures and relations of the present intact.” […]
I describe this approach as “speculative praxis” that uses “theory as a design material.” Critical futures of this kind require a deep and reflexive engagement in sociological and anthropological understandings of the consequences of design and technology.{.highlight} […]
How do we experience change and uncertainty? How can we engage with unfamiliar contexts and situations? What kinds of worlds are we truly committed to building? What must we give up and what might we gain? How might we learn resilience, care, and community in the face of multiple interlinked crises—climate, political, cultural, economic, or otherwise?

the Intersection

You’d better make sure to watch this short pseudo-documentary by Superflux because although it’s nominally about the near future, it also feels really really close. If you leave it to be watched in some “view later” bucket for too long, it might end up being about the present or near past. In the film, the team shows us how a violent present could turn into a cooperative future with the help of “a diverse series of protagonists individually recounting their personal past experiences and their place in the emergence of the future they now live in—both the chaos and the hope that surfaced afterwards.”

Beyond the value of the film itself, I’m also including the project because there’s quite a bit to peruse around it, from the website the Intersection, to the viewing guide which explains various words and concepts found in the film, and suggests questions to reflect upon in class or in a group, to finally an overview of the process involved in the making. Created with a multi-talented team of indies, the project included ethnographic and foresight research, interviews, a study on the impact of emerging ambient technologies on marginalized communities, insight workshops, a sensemaking report, worldbuilding, and storytelling. Dig in.

[W]e are barreling towards a society in which every single interaction with the physical and digital world is fair game for extraction and exploitation. […]
We embrace, simultaneously, a systems view and an assemblages perspective. […]
Where everyone has a role to play in communities; Where decisions are consensus-based; Where commoning of culture, discourses and data only ensure more equality and distributed power; Where Kinship with the land is recognised, and systems work within their ecological limits.{.highlight} […]
Our speculative artefacts propose alternate, craft manifestations of technology, a move back into smaller and tighter communities, emergent decentralized mesh networks, local wifi networks to warn of dangers in the local environment or damages in the network and celebrate the connections between technology and our natural worlds.

The Metaverse is bad

Yes, another piece about the metaverse, no this time it’s not the crypto one. This time it’s the blandest metaverse and the zuckerverse (roughly the same thing). Some good angles from Ian Bogost, and worth a read for what he has to say about “meta,” and for the last quote below, which he doesn’t present as such, but that I basically interpret as ‘the Metaverse is to Zuck what Mars is to Musk.’ (I.e. dreams of grandeur, escape, and control.)

Going meta short-circuited the need to contend with meaning in the first place, replacing it with a tower of deferred meanings, each one-upping the last’s claim to prominence. Memes meme memes, then appear on T-shirts, then recur as Instagrammed latte art. […]
A metaverse is a universe, but better. More superior. An überversum for an übermench. The metaverse, the superman, the private vessel of trillionaire intergalactic escape, the ark on the dark sea of ice melt: To abandon a real and present life for a hypothetical new one means giving up on everything else in the hopes of saving oneself{.highlight}

A mechanism for growing something enduring

Short thread by Maciej Ceglowski on those who might be called ‘NFT maximalists,’ and a good way to understand their zealotry. (Also connects directly with the Zuckymusk dreams above.)

Like the singularity/superintelligence subculture that came before it, both the Martians and the NFT people have an apocalyptic vision of a future where things are fundamentally different. I mean apocalypse not as the end of the world, but that all is swept away and starts afresh. […]
I think recognizing the spiritual hunger that sits at the core of these movements (and remember how many in the space are young people!) is an important step to understanding them. Crypto culture is a mirror world that feeds off of the unexamined failures of the real world.

The state of us

David Mattin attaches a ruling in the UK (an Oxford citizen who installed an Amazon Ring doorbell was convicted of having infringed on neighbour’s privacy), a Face Pay system in Moscow, Amazon One, and China into a short post that gives us a clear view of nascent technostates and the collision course between the state and Big Tech.

Asides

Latest Sentiers Dispatch: [[the-doctor-will-cyborg-you-now?note=no|The Doctor Will Cyborg You Now]]. “A few technologies pointing in a direction I find intriguing, and associating them loosely with the concept of cyborgs.”

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