Technocultural Futurisms
The concept of techno-cultural futurism is imagining how technology will transform society. Technology has a way of changing cultural norms when it comes to race, gender, class, or nationality. This is useful in thinking about technology and the future because it helps people imaging a better future. Society today is one thing, but the hope of what it can be lies within technology and how it is used.
The panel I attended focused on the concept of “move.” It started off with Ricardo Dominguez and the title of his segment was “#FearlessGesture: In the Ruins Yet to Come.” He spoke about movement in terms of becoming translucent to destroy the ruins yet to come like politics. Artists and coders began to display social issues like deportation and the presidency using their skill set in a way to expose the truth.
The second speaker spoke about coding and how in the early stages of coding, words like sliver of memory, bit, pixel, dot, and keister all meant the same thing. From coding, memory has become an image. With analog devices, there is continuous variation so there is almost no limit to where coding can possibly take us.
The last speaker, Nishant Shan, spoke about hacking and “techies.” A techie was originally thought of as someone who has escaped the past, they have no residency in their current home, and they have created a new class. Hackers are powerful because they can get to the public and convince them of various things regardless of government intervention like in Bangalore when thousand of people were fleeing the country based on false crisis information.
Nishant quoted Haraway, author of the Cyborg Manifesto, in his segment saying “ a cyborg is free because it has no past.” However, in his talk he empasized how techies could reinvent themselves with data migration and extraction. Techies/hackers have the power to write a new script entirely or enhance the ones that are already out there. With Haraway’s cyborg, it speaks about not being confined to boundaries like humans and machines and Nishan showed us how that concept is still active.
