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- Convenors:
-
Kirsten Bell
(King's College London)
Bruce Kapferer (UCL University of Bergen)
Marina Gold (University of Zurich)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel will address the methodological implications of anthropology in the digital age – an era of radical transformations in the imagination and formation of socio-political realities and potentially the very nature of human being itself.
Long Abstract:
The digital era promises profound changes and disjunctions in the constitution of humanity and the socio-economic and political situations of experience that has no clear parallels. Even the changes and consequences of the printing press (documented by Elizabeth Eisenstein and numerous others) are dwarfed by the digital, which is reaching into the realities of almost everywhere in the globe in a way far more expansive than did the effects of print.
In this panel, we begin to grapple with the implications of this transformation, which, we suggest, represents nothing less than the total restructuring (and reimaginationing) of the nature of sociality and, indeed, human being itself. Our goal is to examine such processes (accelerated under conditions of covid) and their impact on all aspects of life at all levels of scale – from political and economic orders, to the intimate and mundane (the everyday life of the digital).
The changes that are imagined, and even now being realized, raise issues of a thoroughly anthropological nature that may question hitherto prevailing assumptions. By centring the digital as a vital point of anthropological questioning, we explore its methodological significance for anthropology at this significant moment in history.
We aim for a mix of participants drawn from diverse geographic locations addressing critical areas of the digitalizing process including:
• the reimagination of interpersonal everyday life
• the restructuring of political/economic orders
• new dynamics of control and freedom
• reconfigurations of humanity and identity
• the social contradictions of digital realities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The slow pace of digitalization in Germany is the subject of humour and hand-wringing by its lively 'digital civil society'. This paper contends that it is precisely its negotiated nature that allows the possibility for alternative digitalization, in which these associations play a vital role.
Paper long abstract:
The comparatively slow pace of digitalization in Germany is the subject of humour and hand-wringing by its lively ‘digital civil society’, who decry that much of the country’s state infrastructure is still living ‘in the stone age’. Many parts of the state bureaucracies still rely heavily on paper, and where computers have been integrated they can be outdated, or paper still functions as the essential form of mediation between computerized processes.
This paper contends that Germany’s local bureaucracies and its progressive digital activists in fact share the same value of ‘non-digital-centric-ness’ (Pink et al. 2016): namely, that digitalizing is not a virtue in itself but a process of modernization that should serve existing human needs and ends. This process is the subject of intense negotiation and debate, and rather than being a technological fait accompli, the politics of digital infrastructures sit at the heart of these debates: in which ‘sovereignty’, ‘open source’ and the constitutional right of German citizens to ‘informational self-determination’ are key terms and reference points.
I offer that the effect of slow digitalization in Germany is to produce a meaningful potential for alternative digitalization. A number of salients across the Republic suggest that Germany is pursuing a progressive Sonderweg with respect to digital technologies, in which the hegemony of the Big Five is brought boldly into question.
Paper short abstract:
This talk focuses on the tension between 'communities' and 'crowds' in the world of blockchain enthusiasts, with empirical material from fieldwork in the Bitcoin embassy in Tel Aviv. Digitalization here emerges as a social dynamic that is simultaneously expansive and reductive.
Paper long abstract:
Bitcoinner around the world claim that digital crowding techniques on blockchains go beyond the ether of the virtual to constitute a very concrete/actual phenomenological discharge. This manifests empirically in boom-and-bust cycles, which curiously produce anonymous crowds on a very large scale while also supporting the emergence of self-defined local 'communities'. Adopters of digital money at large in fact speak about themselves as members of a global yet dispersed social movement, premised on what they call 'trsutlessness' and 'decentralization', while also making part of numerous clubs, cooperatives and trading floors; where they regularly meet and often also ritualize their love of cryptocurrencies. The 'curious' analytical point is that these dynamics are essentially contradictory: the crowd keeps expanding while the community tends to consolidate itself through enclosure. Like Alice's bite from a cake in Wonderland, consumption of digital information on the blockchain serves to both expand and reduce imaginary units of social interaction, intermittently structuring 'individuals' (or 'peers'), 'communities' and massive crowds.
Based on empirical fieldwork in Tel Aviv, in this talk I will contemplate on: (1) experimental concepts of digital sociality developed by cryptocurrency users, which might help scholars re-imagine the relationships between singularities and multiplicities; (2) the reinvention of old crowding techniques in new forms on blockchains, especially the use of gamification/play and financial incentives; and (3) the bridges (or tunnels) built across virtual and actual spaces that emergent new forms of financial edgework make possible, especially as this relates to images of social boundaries.
Paper short abstract:
Digitalization has penetrated the humanitarian sphere. The redefinition of the concept and structures of solidarity in the west do not only reveal the transformations of the nation state into a corporate state formation, but they also point to a new political corporate subject.
Paper long abstract:
The digitalization of social, economic and political processes has also penetrated the humanitarian sphere. While digital technologies were familiar to humanitarian organizations for more than a decade, the Covid 19 Pandemic has expanded and accelerated their use and consequences. These range from drones used to deliver goods to remote conflict-ridden locations or to measure fever to patients, contact tracing and epidemiological reporting apps, the donation of funds through cryptocurrency, to educational tools and digitalized microcredit applications, to name a few.
While cautious of data privacy issues and aware of a general lack of egalitarian access to digital technologies, the humanitarian world still heralds the benefits of digitalization for a more efficient and sustainable delivery of aid. However, what is often overlooked is the larger structural transformations that accompany the process of digitalization not only in the locations recipient of aid, but more importantly in the global north, where these large humanitarian organizations and located. At the core of the digitalization of solidarity is the transformation of the political subject of the extinct welfare state. The current enactor of the solidarious humanitarian project is a corporate political construction, citizen of a deterritorialized corporate state. The transformations of the humanitarian aid structure – particularly clear since the pandemic in medically oriented humanitarian and development spheres – is one of corporatization. Through digitalization, the corporate state redefines the political and social subject and its capacity to empathise with the other (a profoundly human experience).
Paper short abstract:
The essay proposes that new forms of individual self-expression made possible by the Internet such as Twitter and Tik Tok have precipitated an ontological crisis between those forms and an increasingly regulatory and censorial State.
Paper long abstract:
There is a famous passage early on in the Blue Book where Wittgenstein discusses the error involved in locating the activity of thinking. Does thinking (and by extension meaning) occur in the mind, in the movements of the larynx, in the writing hand? His answer, depending on the grammar of the statements assigning locality, is: all of the above. Imagining, speaking, writing are all implicated in the mercurial complex that produces meaning. It remains to inquire how new modes of thought expression, modes unknown to Wittgenstein, enter into the production of meaning – modes made possible by the Internet and its applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, Spotify. The essay advances a thesis: those new modes, which give unprecedented communicative access to individuals, pose a threat to the State and its regulatory power. A central government, with its legions of bureaucrats, lawyers, and courts now finds itself increasingly challenged by phenomena like Twitter and Tik Tok. An eighteen-year-old on Tik Tok can reach an audience many times larger than conventional, regulated fora such as cable news and national newspapers. As government regulations pile up, increasingly constraining the lives of individuals, those individuals find an avenue of self-expression – call it freedom – in a messaging app. As governments and their power of censorship pose an ever-greater threat to citizens, a yawning gulf develops between regulated and unregulated messaging. That gulf is an ontological crisis that is now transforming language and a language-bearing humanity.