A collection from the field and from graduate school. This includes field notes, links published articles, semi-polished seminar papers, and syllabi.
AI Anthropology and history Berlin Blockchain Corporate Culture Cybernetics Driverless Cars LGBTQ linguistic-anthropology machine-learning Media theory NFTs Peer Reviewed Published San Francisco Trust Wall Street
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I attended Burning Man: a week-long event where 63,000 people create a temporary city dedicated to art, self-expression, decommodification, and self-reliance. The event is popular with Bay-Area technologists, and I ask about its particular appeal for them. This field note offers an initial answer.
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How does a community remain committed to an imagined digital future despite that future’s inherent contradictions? This peer-reviewed article analyzes such a challenge as it was faced by Berlin’s NFT (non-fungible token) enthusiasts. Dominant narratives about NFTs and other blockchain technologies envision a virtual and ostensibly trust-free future, but these enthusiasts’ pursuit of such “trustless technologies” resulted in a double bind. In this bind, they repudiated trust relations on the web without the means to fully obviate such relations, leaving blockchain’s trustless future in doubt. To resolve this bind, Berlin’s NFT enthusiasts expanded…
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In July 2024, I visited Amsterdam to speak on a conference panel titled “LLMs and the Language Sciences.” Here’s an adapted version of the talk: Six months ago, I moved to San Francisco to study the Bay Area’s AI communities. I arrived with clear ideas about what my interlocutors would be doing and what I would be doing. I imagined AI researchers and engineers coding and writing theorems on white boards, while I would observe and interview. I assumed we’d share some activities as fellow researchers and knowledge workers, such as reading, writing,…
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As we interact with new kinds of technical systems, knowledge we had always taken for granted may no longer go without saying. In other words, new kinds of knowledge might come to be called common sense. As a result, trying to teach common sense to machines before they enter the world will inevitably fall short.
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Berlin’s NFT projects and events remind us that the users of blockchain, like users of any digital technology, are embodied, emplaced, and encultured beings whose lives extend beyond the immediate site of technological interaction. By extension, the affordances of the technologies they use take on particular meanings and values in local context. In Berlin, one key function of NFTs, the function of authentication, becomes a means for preserving the city’s authenticity amid the perceived disappearance of its ethos.
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Whereas it was once noise, meteorological data became signal when lone cars developed into fleets. This post describes how driverless car developers are turning this signal into value as meteorological surplus.
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This post compares driverless cars’ classification systems to centuries-old cloud atlases. Despite filtering clouds from their road perceptions, driverless cars still sense the road atmospherically–that is, according to the same manner as meteorologists read the clouds.
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To solve for weather, driverless car developers design systems to manage rain, fog, and snow. Their systems filter these weather conditions from data collected by the cars’ sensors, rendering them invisible in the cars’ models of the world. However, there is more to solving for weather than mere data manipulation. Though filtered from the cars’ world models, weather leaves lasting imprints on the cars’ material design and modes of perception.
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This peer-reviewed article was published in Anthropology of Work Review. It examines the project of US corporate diversity and inclusion as it is experienced by LGBTQ-identified employees on Wall Street. It draws on ethnographic research among junior bankers who participate in Wall Street’s LGBTQ recruitment events and employee networks. Attending to their claims that queer difference affords them valuable workplace skills, this paper situates these claims within the gendered ideals of Wall Street, models of entrepreneurial selfhood, and ethical projects of self-fashioning. It argues that diversity and inclusion is not simply a novel…
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By tracking the emergence, elaboration, and anthropological sources of the corporate culture concept in best-selling texts, this paper demonstrates how economic downturn, competition, and the turn to flexibility all enabled certain strands of anthropological theory to resonate with concerns of corporate managers during this period. Sampling from anthropological theories influenced by cybernetics and systems theory as well as older structural-functionalism, management researchers and consultants developed and popularized a management approach preoccupied with complex systems, information flows, decentralization, and homeostasis.
Spencer Kaplan 