Technocultural Futurisms: Move Panel
The panel I attended focused on mobilizing the future. This can mean preparing for the future, organizing for a future purpose, putting things into action, and more. These meanings arising from the idea of mobilizing can be applied to understanding technology and the future. We have learned in class about learning from the past to better studies and worlds to come. As technology progresses, it is important to learn from the past to prepare for the future (or, mobilize). In course readings and the panel, organization has been a key word in discussions. Organizing information, or understanding how information is organized, can bring together (or organize) people from different disciplines and cultures. When different perspectives (people and information) join together, more well-informed changes are possible. This form of mobilizing, both in that of information and people, can lead to different understandings of and futures for technology. With understanding and input from various temporalities, cultures, and perspectives, the future of technology may be prepared for, or mobilized, in an informed manner. Additionally, the future may be used, or mobilized, to spur action in the present. This can be important in changing use of technology and more.
Each of these meanings were explored in the three talks, showcasing the importance of mobilization further. Ricardo Dominguez discussed how the future of “ruins yet to come” can be used to encourage change now. This change should be a removal of politics of acceleration and a move toward understanding the impact of things being build and made now as future ruins. Alexander Galloway examined history and organization of information. He focused on how digital technology developed through a digital lens and highlighted the importance of discrete categories in culture. He showed how “the one” becomes “the two” and used the past as a way to mobilize or prepare for the future of technology. Nishant Shah described a group of people and how they mirrored data migration to illustrate a new potential framework for politic construction in regards to technology. He explained pasts and futures are altered with technology and that we must learn to cope with these changes in order to construct politics.
One course reading stuck out with many similarities and differences from the panel discussion. The reading, “Hacker Practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism” by Gabriella Coleman and Alex Golub (3), explored different hacker cultures and discussed those in relation to liberalism. Liberalism was a topic in the first discussion. It was used in both to explore different things, whether it be hacker cultures or technology temporalities. The first talk, by Dominguez, also touched on how questions of ethics often circle back to what should and what should not be legal in technology. The reading also realized this and explained that understanding how technology relates to politics to inform ethics is vital. The third talk provided a type of ethnography of “techies”. The reading also provided an ethnography, but of hackers. They each shared the view that adding to the ethnography was important, but had different results. The reading found multiple types of cultures for hackers while Shah found one culture and one description of techies. While hackers and techies are not the same, this shows a difference in framework. The reading used a liberalism viewpoint to explore hackers (and politics and technology) while Shah used a new type of framework in which he mirrored a group of people to something in the technological world to explain these people (and politics and technology). Both frameworks are different, but possible ways to study these topics.
Sources:
- Lacatusu, Andrei. “Social Decay.” Behance. 2018.
- Manchester Informatics. “Open Call SMEInst-06–2016–2017.” Manchester Informatics, 21 Sept. 2016.
- Coleman, E. Gabriella, and Alex Golub. “Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism.” Anthropological Theory 8.3 (2008): 255–277.
- Bhargava, Rajeev. “A Moment for Indian Liberalism.” The Hindu, 3 Feb. 2018.
