Tag Archives: future

Waiting for the Future

Call it what you will: an anecdotal and impressionist narrative, or a set of strung-together fieldnotes, collected over years of living and working with people across class lines (in my own home construction sites, in an NGO working in the space of education, in my locality with maids and workers and neighbors) suspended indefinitely in a life of participant observation. The following is a story of the ways in which the future frames us—in both senses of the word.

It is a week before the second spate of massive rains will flood Chennai city, causing the worst flooding the city has seen in 100 years. We are at Home Center on TTK Road in Alwarpet, one of the new home and lifestyle chains which feel much like a localized version of Bed, Bath, and Beyond—down to lighting and layout. We are with my parents and elderly uncle, who is fond of remarking on each instance he finds of facilities and services being “just like in a foreign country.” These days, there appear to be many such.

Back home in Pondicherry, a tiny little “modular kitchen” furnishing, appliance, and homeware showroom has recently opened up, directly across from a housing block, built thanks to the Integrated Housing and Slum Development project sanctioned under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM) scheme. Neighborhoods like this one, off-center from the old heritage “white town,” are very mixed, with more expensive apartments and private homes tucked into unlikely nooks, adjoining slums, ‘low income’ government-built tenements, cow sheds, dhobi ghats (washing areas for laundry), and un-walled private plots by default used as open dumps. I’m walking past with a woman, Selvi, who works as a maid in a house nearby, and lives in the government quarters, as they’re known. We remark on the presence of the new kitchen store. “Do you think of going there to buy things?” I ask, somewhat disingenuously. She laughs. “Us? It’s only people like you who can go into shops like that.” I don’t bother to clarify that it’s not the kind of shop I would really think of visiting. Continue reading →

Transhumanists, Technolibertarians, and Technoprogressives

Immortality, privatized space travel, organ ‘printing,’ seasteading, geoengineering, DIY human biology, and augmented humanism are some of the futurological imaginaires of a group of elite new media professionals and social entrepreneurs in Los Angeles. The values associated with these interests intersect with the ethics of technoprogressivism, the utopianism of transhumanism, and the social history of technolibertarianism. Transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement fastidiously committed to biosocially engineering a utopia absent of poverty, boredom, isolation, class strife, illness–even physical death. A fundamental idea of transhumanism is the singularity, a theoretical future point where accelerating computer-processing speed will lead to ever-increasing scientific innovation. Technoprogressives support the ethical convergence of technological and social change. Technolibertarianism emerges from a bourgeois bohemian ideology to advocate for freedom and individualization of markets, technoscience, and social policies.

Using emergent technologies as profitable as well as political tools, these new media social entrepreneurs make or distribute visual and social media about transformative and experimental natural, biological, physical, and social sciences. Examples of systems they make include for-profit and NGO social platforms for medical providers and patients, documentaries about the science of human longevity, and next generation mobile technologies for philanthropic fundraising. In other cases, new media social entrepreneurs are not the engineers of technology but the early adopters, “social broadcasters,” and popularizers of the philosophy of transhumanism and technoprogressivism. Key examples I research include the technoscience of immortality, the social mediation of health care systems, the privatization of space exploration, ocean terraforming, and the “controlled serendipity” of “social broadcasting.” Based on a mix of ethnographic methods consisting of nonfiction production, conference participation, and virtual and actual socializing this research describes how science, technology, media, and sociality intersect in the futurological imaginaries, professional practices, and political economics of new media social entrepreneurs.

An Anthropology of Values

It takes years of study and practice before one even understands what the hell anthropology is or can become. For example, as a transplant from cinema and media studies to anthropology I’d been doing this ethnographic research on new media makers and I was increasingly confused by what made this work anthropology and not something else. Sure, I questioned my informants about their practices, politics, and class—and I made nonfiction videos with them—but all my conclusions seemed rather topical and antiseptic. It didn’t look at all like anthropology. Late last year I asked an informant who had just been fired from a job what was her biggest success and largest failure at her previous position. The question provoked the mediasmith to tell a detailed story of collaboration, struggle, and ambition and to reflect on the conflicting personal and corporate values. The question got me nearer to ‘culture’ than my questionnaire about class and education. This provoked me to engage more with my informants’ off-work passions, readings, hobbies—in the hopes of identifying core values—and less with the technical aspects of their non-fiction and entrepreneurial business operations. Above are some of my zygote findings.