Anthropology?its methodology, its paths to knowing; but also its epistemology, its modes of knowing?saturates the practices of Science and Technology Studies (STS). In a nutshell, anthropology has helped STS find ways to break open the discourses of science. If we were to believe our ?natives??scientists?and accept what they say about what they do and know on their own terms, we would not be able to add anything to these stories. And so in STS, we have modified the anthropological propensity to (...) make the strange familiar and invented the technique of making the familiar strange. Now we can reimagine our natives? stories, note how they are told, and investigate why they are told the way they are?relating them to the practices from which they spring. Our terminological tinkering?refusing to adopt the terms of the actors?is, then, also an epistemological tinkering; we account for these practices in terms of our own. (shrink)

The paper asks how certain zones of technical practice or technologies come to matter as "the Technological", a way of construing political change in terms of technical innovation and invention. The social construction of technology (SCOT) established that things mediate social relations, and that social practices are constantly needed to maintain the workability of technologies. It also linked the production, representation and use of contemporary technologies to scientific knowledge. However, it did all this at a certain cost. To understand something (...) as socially constructed implies that it can be positioned on a pre-given social grid. Making this understanding stick risks affronting others with the claim that their position is not singular, only ordinary. It also runs the risk of not having purchase on those aspects of technological relationality that overflow the framing context of the social (Callon et al. 2002). Building on the ground prepared by SCOT and relying on the work of (Stengers 2000) and (Simondon 1964, 1989), the paper discusses how technologies could be understood as relational events within the contemporary political space. Developing an account of technologies centred on relationality, this paper outlines an epistemology and ontology of the anomalies of technological events, and suggests how excess could explain the Technological. (shrink)

Why do corporations and wealthy philanthropists fund the human sciences? Examining the history of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a private research institute founded in the early 1980s, this article shows that funders can find as much value in the social worlds of the sciences they sponsor as in their ideas. SFI became increasingly dependent on funding from corporations and libertarian business leaders in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, its intellectual work came to focus on the underlying (...) principles of adaptation, innovation, and decentralized coordination supposedly at work in ‘complex systems’ from biological ecosystems to markets and firms. This research cast the ideas of the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek into a new scientific idiom. SFI also became a space where figures in business, media, academia, and politics could come to learn to see the world in a particular way—to acquire the subjectivity of what I call ‘the Santa Fe Institute libertarian’. At SFI, visitors did not simply learn the principles of neo-Hayekian complex system science. They came to see themselves as agents of social evolution, providing the spark that the free-market system needed to produce new technologies and new solutions to social problems without top-down political direction. For the Institute's corporate and libertarian financiers, SFI was not just a space where intellectuals described the world in favored ideological terms, but a space where elite actors became committed to the project of making a new political-economic order. (shrink)

This essay considers how scholarly approaches to the development of molecular biology have too often narrowed the historical aperture to genes, overlooking the ways in which other objects and processes contributed to the molecularization of life. From structural and dynamic studies of biomolecules to cellular membranes and organelles to metabolism and nutrition, new work by historians, philosophers, and STS scholars of the life sciences has revitalized older issues, such as the relationship of life to matter, or of physicochemical inquiries to (...) biology. This scholarship points to a novel molecular vista that opens up a pluralist view of molecularizations in the twentieth century and considers their relevance to current science. (shrink)

Today the halls of Technology, Entertainment, and Design and Davos reverberate with optimism that hacking, brainstorming, and crowdsourcing can transform citizenship, development, and education alike. This article examines these claims ethnographically and historically with an eye toward the kinds of social orders such practices produce. This article focuses on a hackathon, one emblematic site of social practice where techniques from information technology production become ways of remaking culture. Hackathons sometimes produce technologies, and they always, however, produce subjects. This article argues (...) that the hackathon rehearses an entrepreneurial citizenship celebrated in transnational cultures that orient toward Silicon Valley for models of social change. Such optimistic, high-velocity practice aligns, in India, with middle-class politics that favor quick and forceful action with socially similar collaborators over the contestations of mass democracy or the slow construction of coalition across difference. (shrink)

Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated through the mechanisms of artifice. Whereas film studies has drawn (...) upon work ranging from production history to semiotics and psychoanalysis to conceptualize the ways in which the appearance of life on the cinema screen materializes subjectivities beyond it, STS has developed a corpus of theoretical and empirical scholarship that works to refigure material-semiotic entanglements of subjects and objects. In approaching animation and automation through insights developed within these two fields we hope to bring them into closer dialogue with each other and with studies of the body, given the convergence of their shared concerns with affective materializations of life. More specifically, an interest in the moving capacities of animation, and in what gets rendered invisible in discourses of automation, is central to debates regarding the interdependencies of bodies and machines. Animation is always in the end a relational effect, it seems, while automation implies the continuing presence of hidden labour and care. (shrink)

Artificial Life has two goals. One attempts to describe fundamental qualities of living systems through agent based computer models. And the second studies whether or not we can artificially create living things in computational mediums that can be realized either, virtually in software, or through biotechnology. The study of ALife has recently branched into two further subdivisions, one is “dry” ALife, which is the study of living systems “in silico” through the use of computer simulations, and the other is “wet” (...) ALife that uses biological material to realize what has only been simulated on computers, effectively wet ALife uses biological material as a kind of computer. This is challenging to the field of computer ethics as it points towards a future in which computer and bioethics might have shared concerns. The emerging studies into wet ALife are likely to provide strong empirical evidence for ALife’s most challenging hypothesis: that life is a certain set of computable functions that can be duplicated in any medium. I believe this will propel ALife into the midst of the mother of all cultural battles that has been gathering around the emergence of biotechnology. Philosophers need to pay close attention to this debate and can serve a vital role in clarifying and resolving the dispute. But even if ALife is merely a computer modeling technique that sheds light on living systems, it still has a number of significant ethical implications such as its use in the modeling of moral and ethical systems, as well as in the creation of artificial moral agents. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, the computer and videogame has emerged as a popular recreational pastime. While often associated with the artificial and alien, it is my contention that the modern videogame informs on the subject of “nature” and what we consider to be natural. This article delineates some of the “natures” posited in computer game design. It provides a valuable overview of gaming culture and might serve as an introduction to further research on specific game genres. It argues that (...) virtual worlds are currently serving a dual purpose, of reinforcing traditional stereotypes of the natural world, while gradually moving towards radical, new forms of “virtual” nature to contend with. It suggests that the mimicking of biological systems in computer games expresses both our lingering cultural interest in the “great outdoors” and a need to give familiarity and substance to an electronic medium marked by its failure to fit within traditional notions of space and geography. (shrink)

One way to study ontology is to assess how people differentiate real activities from others, and a good case is how groups organize simulation. However, social scientists have tended to discuss simulation in more limited ways, either as a symptom of postmodernism or as an instrumental artifact. Missing is how groups organize simulations to prepare for the future. First, I formulate a definition of simulation as a group-level technique, which includes the qualities of everyday ontology, playfulness, risk and consequence reduction, (...) constrained innovation, and transportability. Next, I use ethnographic data collected at an amateur boxing gym to argue that simulations simplify the most risky, unpredictable, and interpersonal aspects of a consequential performance. The problem is that a simulation can rarely proceed exactly like the reality it is derived from. For example, boxers hold back in sparring but should not in competition. The effectiveness of a simulation therefore depends on how robust the model is and how well members translate the imperfect fit between the contextual norms of the simulation and its reality. (shrink)

The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist’s laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot’s life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing — or truncated — labours of its affiliated humans. But (...) while animal models are rendered progressively more standardised and replicable as tools for the biological sciences, the humanoid robot is individuated and naturalised. Three stagings of human— robot encounters (with the robots Mertz, Kismet and Robota respectively) demonstrate different possibilities for conceptualising these subject objects, for the claims about humanness that they corporealise, and for the kinds of witnessing that they presuppose. (shrink)

The belief that computers will soon become transcendently intelligent and that human beings will “upload” their minds into machines has become ubiquitous in public discussions of robotics and artificial intelligence in Western cultures. Such beliefs are the result of pervasive Judaeo-Christian apocalyptic beliefs, and they have rapidly spread through modern pop and technological culture, including such varied and influential sources as Rolling Stone, the IEEE Spectrum, and official United States government reports. They have gained sufficient credibility to enable the construction (...) of Singularity University in California. While different approaches are possible (and, indeed, are common in Japan and possibly elsewhere), this particular vision of artificial intelligence and robotics has gained ground in the West through the influence of figures such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil. Because pop-science books help frame public discussion of new sciences and technologies for individuals, corporations, and governments alike, the integration of religious and technoscientific claims made by their authors should be clear and open for public and scientific debate. As we move forward into an increasingly robotic future, we should do so aware of the ways in which a group's religious environment can help set the tone for public acceptance and use of robotic technologies. (shrink)

There have been different approaches to the study of the relations between mass media on the one hand and science and technological activities on the other. In this article, I summarize consumption approaches, point out some of their limitations, and then show how these limitations can be addressed by drawing on an ethnographic study I conducted of an academic engineering research laboratory. I analyze the discursive practices lab members use to interpret mass media. One practice treats media as reference points (...) that mark a lab member’s growing alignment with the profession of electrical and computer engineering, and this constructs an engineering self by providing an opportunity for lab members to display knowledge of the prevalence and shapes of robots and align themselves with the firsthand knowledge prized in engineering culture. Another practice uses the discourse-in-practice of religion to construct an engineering self by aligning the speaker with things that are valued in engineering culture such as objectivity, science, evolution, and literature reviews. The final practice I analyze involves repurposing media technologies in ways that are helpful for both current and future lab research projects, which constructs selves by giving lab members an opportunity to show they know which features of media are relevant for engineering and how these features can be used to address engineering problems. I conclude with a discussion of how this contributes to studies of engineering identity and the relations between science, technology, and media. (shrink)

The organic unity between the head and the vital arms of the octopus is proposed as a metaphor for science and religion as an academic field. While the specific object of the field is to pursue second-order reflections on existing and possible relations between sciences and religions, it is argued that several aspects of realism and normativity are constitutive to the field. The vital arms of the field are related to engagements with distinctive scientific theories, specialized philosophy of science, representative (...) theological proposals, and the input from the study of world religions. (shrink)