General | Platypus

Challenging Normalized Surveillance: “Birds on the Wire” Surveillance in Mexico

 Mariel Garcia-Montes  August 6, 2024

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

In Mexican slang, “hay pájaros en el alambre” (there are birds on the wire), is an expression used to imply that a private conversation is at risk of being intentionally overheard. Birds on the wire can mean anything from one’s auntie overhearing a conversation from the other room, to a phone being wiretapped at long range by a state agency. In everyday parlance, this phrase does a lot of work to signal a broader awareness and cultural acceptance of surveillance. If, in conversation, someone is reminded of the birds on the wire, they are expected to beware—not for the birds to go away. Perhaps the statement produces a chilling effect of sorts, rather than an expectation of privacy. (read more...)

Questioning the Market: How Does the South Korean “Camming” (Beot-bang) Market Grow?

 Yuna Hwang  August 1, 2024

한국어 번역문은 여기에 있습니다.

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With the development of digital technologies, online spaces have transformed many aspects of individuals’ lives by creating infrastructures that allow various actors to freely access these spaces anytime, anywhere. The realm of sexual desire and transactions has also expanded and transformed through the mediation of digital technologies. Sanders et al. (2018) propose categorizing various aspects of these sexual transactions as “internet-based sex work,” distinguishing between the use of the internet to promote or mediate sexual services as direct sex work, and sexual activity that occurs online or in a virtual environment as indirect sex work (Sanders et al., 2018: 15). This type of sexual work, known in English as “webcamming” or “camming,” is a typical form of indirect sex work, where sexual services are traded via digital devices without physical contact. The platforms that mediate this work are considered the new marketplaces for sexual transactions (Jones, 2020: 3; Henry and Farvid, 2017: 119). (read more...)

Trolling: Breaking Rules, Poking Fun, or Just Outright Harassment?

 Chu May Paing  July 30, 2024

ဤဆောင်းပါးကို မြန်မာဘာသာနှင့်လည်းဖတ်ရှုနိုင်ပါသည်။

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“I am not reading all of that, but fuck Chu May Paing. What a fraud.” I didn’t see the comment on Facebook when it was first posted. I only found out a day after, through a friend of mine who shared a screenshot of the comment with me over a direct message. I will refer to the troll by a generic pseudonym of “John.” As ballsy of a troll as he was to leave such an inflammatory comment about me using his full real name, John was still not brave enough to leave it directly under one of my posts; he had left it under someone else’s post who mentioned my writing. I recognized John’s name right away when I saw the screenshot. John is a cishet white man in his late 30s or early 40s doing a PhD in anthropology with a focus on my home country Burma at an institution located on the Pacific Coast of the United States. As a frequent writer of irritating comments on Burmese users’ posts that create unnecessary disruptions in online discussions of Burma, John is notorious as an annoying online troll. He might be better known as a troll than a “scholar.” The Internet is John’s playground. Burmese people are his target. And trolling on Facebook seems to be how he soothes his boredom. (read more...)

Digital Anthropology of the Senses: Connecting Technology and Culture Through the Sensory World

 Adriana Moreno  July 23, 2024

Este contenido también está disponible en español

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With the ubiquity of the Internet and the overwhelming number of screens that mediate our daily practices, the predominance of the image in daily life is indisputable. The image’s omnipresence has guided countless academic works focused on the visual. For example, visual studies and specialties such as visual anthropology highlight the ethnographic value of images, which, analog or digital alike, have become powerful vehicles for the construction of knowledge (Zirión, 2015; Gómez Cruz, 2012). However, given the predominance of the visual, we have neglected research regarding other senses; this gap widens even more if we consider its intersection with digital studies. (read more...)

Cards and Codes: Spirituality and Magic in the (Bio)technological Era

 PEDRO DE MEDEIROS  July 11, 2024

Este conteúdo também está disponível em Português.

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This is not a scientific or technological project, but perhaps it is a project about science and technology. My proposal is to create a magical tool, a tarot deck, that provokes thought about how mystical and religious elements permeate the advancement of science and technology, especially in the field of biotechnology, and are in constant confluence with all aspects surrounding it: academia, startups, investors, and the like. (read more...)

To Witness: Cell Phone Cameras, Immigrant Communities, and Police Accountability

 Jessica L. Olivares  July 2, 2024

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“There is nothing like an iPhone …to show people the problem…” -Alex Vitale, The End of Policing As I contemplate the momentum of the 2024 presidential election cycle, my focus turns to the potential consequences of a renewed Trump presidency. Drawing on my expertise as an ethnographer, I recall the socio-technological impacts of his initial presidency, which fueled activism and organizing for civil liberties. What follows is a reflection on my fieldwork in Houston, Texas during 2018 and 2019, focusing on how anti-surveillance advocates at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas used cell phones and their cameras as resistance tools. The ACLU has been an active proponent for those in need of protection from government surveillance by educating people in the US on their constitutional rights, advocating for the protection of civil liberties, and taking legal action to stop violations of those rights and liberties. During my eighteen months of research, I engaged with anti-surveillance advocates at the national, state, and city levels who prepared organizing efforts and legal cases limiting unlawful surveillance capabilities. For this piece, I focus on promoting cell phone camera usage in ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” workshops and through the ACLU Blue and ACLU La Migra mobile applications. Throughout the piece, I reckon with what Deborah Thomas calls “the often difficult-to-parse relationships between surveillance and witnessing” (2000, 717). Witnessing the precarity of past ethnographic junctures can highlight injustices, bring them to attention, and formulate strategies for their alleviation. Thus, bearing witness to the past moments may help gain agency over unpredictable futures. (read more...)

Anthropology of a Dream: The Stakes of Studying Addiction in America

 Sean Muller  June 25, 2024

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In America, the desire for a dream echoes in personal, popular, and political narratives like a refrain promising inevitable progress. I regard addiction as the mirror of this dream in which capitalist processes of production and consumption are embodied at their imaginable limits and addicts appear as perfected capitalist subjects. Drug addicts produce to consume and consume to reproduce themselves, a cycle of reproduction that tightens as their world shrinks, as they increasingly withdraw from social relations to become an economy of one—an autonomously productive and consumptive individual who destroys themselves to reproduce themself (Pine 2019). Addiction emerges as a problem alongside the fantasy of a “good life” characterized by “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” (Berlant 2011: 3). What habits and histories shape the endurance of this dream and why do we imagine anything different as a failure? (read more...)

On Disability, Infrastructure, and Shame

 Elizabeth Roberts  June 18, 2024

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Content note: This piece centers an evolving journey with internalized ableism and accompanying feelings of virtue and shame, particularly around public transportation, driving, and accessibility. Readers can step back from this piece if it is too difficult to read right now. I did not expect Northern Europe to make me more disabled than the United States and Mexico—more disabled and more ashamed. In 2015, I began experiencing chronic nerve pain on my right side—hip and shoulder—which developed in response to a complex musculoskeletal condition. By 2019, I could not walk more than a few blocks or lift much with my right arm, and if I climbed too many stairs in a day, I would pay for it later. In addition to walking, I stopped being able to bike, swim, or hike. Some days just moving around the house or doing the dishes would activate agonizing pain. Over time, I stopped going to places where I couldn’t drive. (read more...)