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 Syllabi 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
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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
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Teaching with AI When I tell people (especially academics) that I research AI, they often ask about classroom uses of AI. The questions are anxious ones. Will students lose access to reliable information? Will they forget how to write? Can teachers retain control over pedagogy? Will teaching jobs disappear? When it comes to the present
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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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How can a discipline preoccupied with the ‘savage slot’ and the ‘suffering slot’ turn its attention to those with the most power in a given society or community? How has the study of elites required anthropologists and ethnographers elsewhere to challenge and reconfigure taken-for-granted methods? What have ethnographers learned about elites and the role elites play in the most pressing social processes of our time? And finally, what can attempts to study up teach us about studying in any direction? This semester, we will pursue such questions.
Spencer Kaplan 