Both writers force us to consider how particular technologies not only exacerbate and deepen forms of social alienation and control, but graft onto already-existing social arrangements. Further, both foreground the ways that speculative futures draw upon racialized and casted anxieties in delimiting who is human or robotic, worthy of being healed o... See more

pieces examine how transness has been pathologized as a medical disorder requiring a cure, or that one assimilate in effort to become “unclockable.” And ultimately, the case of people who move across gender assignations displaces the ongoingness of colonial classification systems. Those with an expressed disinterest in being “cured” of their presum... See more

Also, despite a stated rejection of techno-solutionism being the one political commitment around which a series of fractious computer science fields can rally, triumphalist narrators, like peddlers hawking their goods, still tend to elevate the technology itself as the protagonist. But technology is merely the tools and techniques marshalled by peo... See more

technologies narrated with commercial marketing terms like “artificial intelligence” are embedded in, and direct consequences of, human intention and political insistence.

“Even if, as I believe, the vitality of matter is real, it will be hard to discern it, and, once discerned, hard to keep focussed on,” Bennett writes. “I have come to see how radical a project it is to think vital materiality.” It’s not just that concentration can be wearisome. Bennett had shown me that picture of the dead rats for a reason: being ... See more

The world is combinatorially weird and fractally interesting. And therefore, omnivorous curiosity is the only proper response. ... let’s optimize instead for the interesting, the strange, and the weird. Ideas and topics that ignite our curiosity are worthy of our attention, because they might lead to advances and insights that we can’t anticipate.

As Rebecca Solnit wrote for The Guardian, “Our greatest power lies in our roles as citizens, not consumers, when we can band together to collectively change how our world works.

While we know that our imaginations shape our sociocultural experience through the creation of worlds, modernity thrives by throwing tight constraints around it, degenerating our ability and capacity to imagine radically new futures into being. This ontological war against possibility is ‘defuturing’ — there are less futures available to us; or put... See more