Alix Johnson, a PhD student in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, will be going to Iceland to study the practices and discourses of data centers. She studies information infrastructures in capitalist economies and postcolonial politics, and researches these questions in Iceland where they take strange and fascinating forms. Adam Fish: What makes Iceland important […]
The Background: “Dead and Buried” At the end of 2013, a flare-up involving the work of Daniel Miller and his colleagues revealed a complex set of tensions regarding how digital culture scholars, journalists, and others in the technology sector address public engagement, prediction, and ethnographic methods. In this essay I use these tensions to investigate […]
I share a dream: to ensure that long oppressed racial minority and diverse voices can articulate themselves in the futures imagined in the practices of long- term thinking and in the professional areas of foresight . Promises about the future in the strategic fields of long-term thinking and how they are portrayed in popular culture […]
In light of the ongoing leaking of information about international and domestic government surveillance by the National Security Administration (NSA) in the United States and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the United Kingdom, scholars and administrators need to reconsider if our data and confidential communications are truly secure. While the ethics review committees do their […]
This dialogue was inspired by Kevin Driscoll’s insightful book review in the L.A. Review of Books, of Finn Brunton’s superb new book, Spam: The Shadow History of the Internet. I asked Kevin if he would use a bit of his review to begin a dialogue with Finn; the conversation moved quickly to the methodological challenges […]