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Short abstract:

This paper examines how researchers translate technoscientific knowledges from different disciplines to develop a model of the human which foregrounds its capacities for 'affinity," as the means for the human to be smoothly integrated into the infrastructures of near-future Japan.

Long abstract:

Recent initiatives by the Japanese government to address perceived threats to economic growth and social cohesion presented by environmental degradation, population decline, and lags in innovation foreground the role of new types of information and communication technologies. These will wrap around each individual, sensing their everyday activities and translating them into data to smoothly integrate them into “Society 5.0,” an imagined near-future society which will facilitate individual well-being and economic productivity. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with scientists and engineers working on creating the “ambient” technological infrastructures for this society explore how they reimagine the human being. I focus on how researchers participating in a major nationally funded project translated knowledges from engineering, information theory, and biology into a model of the human that could become part of the infrastructure of the ‘ambient information society,’ a precursor of “Society 5.0.” While existing scholarship focuses on the body in and as infrastructure through the connection of its social, biological, and metabolically (re)productive functions with the production of economic value, I discuss how the body’s capacity for affinity with other organisms and for technologies becomes the focus of human/technology integration efforts. By doing so, I explore the tensions that emerge when this new model of the human pushes researchers to imagine it as more than an engine of economic production.