Research | Platypus

Between Apollo and Dionysus

 Gabriella Coleman  October 15, 2013

Anonymous is a banner used by individuals and as well as multiple, unconnected groups unfurling operations across the globe from Brazil to the Philippines, from the Dominican Republic to India. Since 2008, activists have used the name to organize diverse forms of collective action, ranging from street protests to web site defacement. Their iconography—Guy Fawkes masks and headless suited men—symbolically asserts the idea of anonymity, which they embody in deed and words. To study and grasp a phenomenon that proudly announces itself “Anonymous” might strike one as a futile and absurd exercise or exercise in futility and absurdity. A task condemned to failure. Over the last five years, I felt the sting of disorienting madness as I descended deep down the multiple rabbit holes they dug. Unable to distinguish truth from lies, and unable to keep up with the explosive number of political operations underway at one time, a grinding (read more...)

The Many Mysteries of MSW

 Robin Nagle  September 4, 2013

Picture a garbage truck – say, the classic rear-compactor model. Listen to its diesel engine growl as it comes down a street in a large city. Hear its air brakes hiss as it stops next to a pile of trash bags or a row of garbage cans. Watch a worker climb from its cab and tug on his gloves as he walks toward those bags and cans. See him bend, reach, lift, and fling bag after bag, or empty can after can, into the gaping maw of the truck’s hopper. Observe: he feeds it until it can hold no more, then pulls a pair of levers and pauses while a wide blade descends to scoop the contents of the hopper into the body of the truck. Versions of this scenario, mundane and unremarkable, are repeated every day in cities the world over. Garbage collection constitutes a form of mobile infrastructure (read more...)

Heather Paxson, Winner of the 2013 Forsythe Prize, on Post-Pasteurianism

 Heather Paxson  August 27, 2013

Since my undergraduate days, I’ve both aspired to do feminist anthropology and been fascinated with people’s everyday engagement with mundane (and extraordinary) technologies. I can’t express how thrilled and honored I am to receive the 2013 Diana Forsythe Prize for The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press), my ethnography of American artisanal cheese, cheesemaking and cheesemakers. I do not present a summary of the book here (if interested, the Introduction is available on the UC Press website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520270183). Instead, I alight on some of the STS-related themes that run throughout my book (and especially Chapter 6): regulating food safety and promoting public health, artisanal collaboration with microbial agencies, and the mutual constitution of production and consumption. Real Cheese or Real Hazard — or Both? By U.S. law, cheese made from raw (unpasteurized) milk, whether imported or domestically produced, must be aged at least (read more...)

Steampunk: Reimagining Trash and Technology

 Matt Hale  August 20, 2013

It begins with a question. What if? What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo, if the Hindenburg hadn’t crashed, or if Thomas Edison had never been born? What might the world be like if history had been different? Steampunk is an expressive genre that explores the possibilities of a past that never was, but might have been. Inspired by the steam-powered and mechanistic imagery of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells’ novels and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos of cyberpunk art and literature, steampunk combines the aesthetics and materials of the nineteenth century with the technological developments and sensibilities of the twenty-first. It is a style defined by anachronism and guided by an impulse to explore and interrogate the role of technology in everyday life. Although the genre began as a form of speculative literature in the 1980s and 1990s, it took on new life during the first decade of (read more...)

Open Science and the Ambivalence of the Digital Economy

 Alessandro Delfanti  July 30, 2013

What does sharing mean in contemporary science? New practices of open science are questioning assumptions about the evolution of scientific cultures. Often, references to the emergence of new forms of open sharing and cooperation through digital networks point at the restoration of a modern scientific ethos of sharing and communalism to which scientists are somehow naturally socialised. Yet I believe scientific cultures are the subject of a cultural mash-up. This includes cultural elements taken from the modern, Mertonian ethos of science that preceded the late 20th century transformation towards academic capitalism and post-academic science. Elements coming from that tradition are still at scientists’ disposal, since the influence of that culture has survived the social dimension from which it was born, but they need to remix it with new and different cultural elements directly related to computers and information technologies, which are indistricable from today’s scientific enterprise. An old culture that is pre-existing, accepted, (read more...)

What’s Up in the Cloud(s)?

 Casey O'Donnell  July 16, 2013

In May, Adobe prompted me reflect on the “Cloud.” Adobe announced that it’s widely used “Creative Suite,” which includes things like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and many other software products would be transitioning to a subscription-based, web-based and cloud-based product, the “Creative Cloud.” My first (and clearly cynical) thought was, “Well, at least I don’t have to install their bloated software anymore or have Acrobat update every other day.” At the same time, the reality of what that would mean for people who use these products for their jobs, encouraged me to consider it further. It also prompted me to return to a 2008 discussion between Richard Stallman and Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian. I should also disaggregate the cloud infrastructure from products that deliver their services via the cloud. These are often conflated in accounts of the trend. The cloud infrastructure is/are computers and the networks that connect them and them to (read more...)