Platypus

Stephen Hawking, Automation, and Politics

 Hélène Mialet  January 10, 2017

This year has been particularly charged with emotion. The stars that have lit up our Universe for a decade, or a century, have slipped away, one after another: Prince, Bowie, Princess Leia and her Mother. Stephen Hawking, who was doomed to an early death more than 50 years ago, celebrated his 75th birthday this past weekend. One never knows what life puts in our path… Hawking thinks he knows, though, and he is warning us. Hawking, indeed, seems to have become an Oracle, the Faust of the 21st Century. This is how, in 2015, he and Berlioz’s Faust were simultaneously reinvented under the demiurgic hand of the director Alvis Hermanis and the bemused eyes of its Parisian audience at the Opera Bastille in Paris. This was nearly one year ago. What’s next? The one, whose existence and career as a physicist has been made possible thanks to technology, as he likes to recall himself, is now warning us about the consequences of accelerating technological change. In so doing, he is making visible what has been the slogan of my field (Science and Technology Studies) from its inception: that the political, the social, the scientific, and the technical are always intertwined. This we should never forget. (read more...)

Cryonics in the Cradle of Technocivilization

 Abou Farman  December 9, 2016

Until recently, cryonics typically appeared in the media and in science publications as the butt of jokes or an occasion to delight in scandals, gore, zombies and decapitation. But a convergence of old alliances and new research formations in the cradle of technocivilization have legitimized broadly research into the indefinite extension of life. Today, it no longer surprises me to see prominent mainstream science publications put out serious pieces on cryonics as a credible scientific project. Cryonics, for those who haven’t heard of it, is the practice of freezing and storing human bodies upon legal death, with hopes of future re-animation. In its July 2 issue, The New Scientist carried a cover story called ‘The Resurrection Project,’ with three full features on various aspects of cryonics. In the fall, the MIT Technology Review had published a piece called ‘The Science Surrounding Cryonics,’ written in response to a piece published a month earlier called ‘The False Science of Cryonics’—which in turn was a response to a very popular front page New York Times story documenting the last days of a young woman who, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, had opted to be cryopreserved upon death. As it has gone about the ever-industrious business of boundary maintenance, institutional science has worked diligently to dismiss cryonics-related work as taboo science. For example, the Society for Cryobiology, the professional association for scientists who work on low temperature preservation of all biological matter, explicitly denies membership to anyone engaged in “freezing deceased persons in anticipation of their reanimation.” (read more...)

Forsythe Prize 2016: Everett Zhang on Chinese medicine, globalization, and embodiment

 Everett Zhang  November 22, 2016

I am very delighted to receive an honorable mention for the Diana Forsythe Prize from The General Anthropology Division of American Anthropological Association. I am very grateful. I grew up in Maoist China and experienced the early period of post-Mao reform—its excitement as well as its big setbacks before I came to the US. Becoming an anthropologist and contributing to the understanding of this tremendous transformation are two undertakings closely related to each other. Neither is easy, but it was this combination that brought about the book now called The Impotence Epidemic. Starting from the phenomenon—the increasing visibility of a seemingly infamous “epidemic,” I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the relationship between body and society. When I was doing my fieldwork, many of my friends, former schoolmates, former colleagues and acquaintances in China were very surprised at this project, puzzled about my seriousness, and doubtful about its intellectual and academic value. (read more...)

Eben Kirksey, Winner of the 2016 Forsythe Prize, on caring for the future

 Eben Kirksey  November 14, 2016

Each year, Platypus invites the recipients of the annual Forsythe Prize to reflect on their award-winning work. This week’s post is from 2016 winner Eben Kirksey, for his book Emergent Ecologies (Duke, 2016). Surprising hopes can proliferate against the backdrop of seemingly impossible odds, dashed dreams, and disappointing circumstances. Looking to possible futures, rather than to absolute endings, Jacques Derrida celebrated forms of hope that contain “the attraction, invincible élan or affirmation of an unpredictable future-to-come.” “Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire,” wrote Derrida, “it is necessary to insist on it more than ever.” In the days after Donald Trump was elected President, as Republicans begin to lock in control of the legislative and judicial branches of the US government, it would be easy for people committed to social and ecological justice to resign the future to fate. Converting despair to hope involves playing with the uneasy alchemy of the pharmakon, that is, turning obstacles into opportunities, transforming poison into a cure. As an emergent social movement in the United States works to trump hate with love, strategies and tactics might be borrowed from Latin American intellectuals who have turned blasted landscapes into flourishing ecosystems, who have worked to ground hopes in shared futures with endangered species. (read more...)

DDoS, DNS, and The Remarkable Case of Seven Crypto-Officers

 Elizabeth Rodwell  November 7, 2016

Something big happened on October 27. Something unprecedented. And like much high-level change that impacts the Internet’s basic infrastructure, this change came down to the actions of a handful of carefully chosen people. It involved a ceremony straight out of a sci-fi movie–seemingly rife with opportunity for espionage, intrigue, or a massive telegenic heist. For STS-focused social scientists, this story is compelling for the layers of trust involved, and the way technical security and human relationships intersect. That something so critical to global infrastructure can be reduced to concepts like duty and accountability is neither surprising nor novel, per se—but it is remarkable. But let me backtrack, as this is really about two news stories. Friday, October 21, 2016 saw a massive disruption in internet traffic, particularly for the Northeastern United States. The outage, a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) started at 7am EST, appears intended as a show of force, and was directed at New Hampshire-based Internet infrastructure company Dyn. (read more...)

The Second Project: Teaching Research through Collaboration

 Ali Kenner  November 1, 2016

Editor’s Note: This is the third entry in the Second Project Series. You can read the second post here. This series explores an often undiscussed moment in professionalization: the shift from the research you began as a graduate student to the new work undertaken as an early- or mid-career scholar. This series is especially interested in personal journeys and institutional features that enabled or constrained this transition. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Lisa. Monday afternoons at least a dozen students and I gather to work on a collaborative ethnographic project. Some weeks we meet around a long, boardroom style table where we discuss article outlines, literature reviews, and “findings” crafted by our team members. Other weeks we organize around a handful of circular tables where small working groups tackle different pieces of the project—analyzing quantitative data using SPSS, creating GIS maps, coding qualitative survey questions, or co-writing a white paper, which we hope to have ready by the end of the year. About a third of these students have worked on the project since September 2014, when we conducted a door-to door survey across three Philadelphia neighborhoods. Others have joined the team along the way, interested in learning social science research on an active project. Many more, who worked on the first leg or two of the project, have since graduated. Most have stayed in touch and a few continue to collaborate with our group in some way, as professionals in nonprofits or community-based organizations, and also as graduate students in PhD and Master’s programs elsewhere. Among our group there is a real sense of community built around engaged interdisciplinary research focused on environmental health; this sense has been cultivated pedagogically through research design. Across academic contexts, teaching and research are treated separately, and are often pitted against each other. Research, we are told, comes first and teaching, second. To me, the outcomes of such division are ethically problematic. I also believe this division misrepresents our intellectual lives and scholarship. My second project is as much about addressing this misrepresentation as it is environmental health, technoscience, and urban landscapes. There is no question in my mind that teaching research, and collaborating with students has made me a better scholar. (read more...)

Hippocratic Hacking

 Amelia Hassoun  October 27, 2016

A few days ago Johnson and Johnson told patients that one of its insulin pumps can be hacked. This story is just the latest in a series of pieces calling into question the security of wearable medical devices like pacemakers and blood glucose monitors, which have in recent years been increasingly equipped with wireless capabilities. These Wi-Fi connections allow for the easy transmission of medical data from the patient’s body to their clinicians, but also leave the device vulnerable to unauthorized outside access. There’s an intimacy about medical devices that live in or on the body that gives rise to particularly salient fears of attacks from these imagined hackers. Wearers fret that hackers could flood diabetics with insulin, shut off pacemakers regulating the heartbeat, or steal highly personal medical data. But to whom does their medical data belong anyway? (read more...)