‘I am fascinated by possibilities. There’s nothing I like better than seeing what can be, than perhaps transitioning those possibilities into this world. In the past few years I have honed my ability to see possibilities (and a process to make them real). I can see around corners, juggle variables and play a metaphorical shell game with data, research & time extrapolations to create a cone of plausability, mine the possibilities in and around it (wildcards fall on the edge or outside of them) and identify (sometimes multiple based on your valueset/variables) preferred futures.’

— heathervescent, ‘Reflections on Preferred Futures, Possibilities & Impossibilities‘

photo credit: mikecogh

The Fountain of Youth, reversed.

Disillusionment = freedom from sensory distortions = wisdom?

Be the emu.

(Also a good name for a #collapsonomics theme bar.)

photo credit: Orin Zebest

Been dipping in and out of Eli Parisier’s The Filter Bubble (2011), as part of a longer piece I’m working on. Had some rough thoughts and jottings I wanted throw out into the darkness:

• ‘Personalized search for everyone’ (Google’s stated mission, for a time)

• The filter bubble provides ‘a unique universe of information for each of us … which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information’ (Parisier, 2011: 9)

• ‘When the technology’s job is to show you the world, it ends up sitting between you and reality, like a camera lens.’ (Parisier, 2011: 13)

• ‘Spain’s first gay retirement home passes its first hurdle‘ (The Guardian, 03/01/2011)

• ‘Something in the Air‘ (Frieze interview with Peter Sloterdijk)

• ‘State of Air‘ (BLDBLOG)

• Pillarisation (verzuiling) — ‘a term used to describe the politico-denominational segregation of Dutch and Belgian society …  ”vertically” divided into several segments or “pillars” (zuilen) according to different religions or ideologies.’

• Doorbraak (‘breakthrough’) — ‘an attempt to renew the politics of the Netherlands after the Second World War.’

• ‘Openness and the Metaverse Singularity‘ (Jamais Cascio, 2007 — good on AR filtering)

• ‘Bridging Capital and Social Cohesion in an English village setting‘ (Roy Greenhalgh, 2008)

Starting to wonder if the our best chance of filter bubble-busting Doorbraak might have been something like ChatRoulette. Certainly, one of my highlights of 2010 was encouraging my neighbour to play guitar to a baffled Chilean dentistry student.

Simpler times!

‘To both design and politics, futures affords some tools to crack open times-to-come as a far richer domain for discussion. It also offers the holistic systems-thinking and temporal reach that are necessary to move beyond ideology-driven argumentation about ‘the (singular) future’ into more systematic and multi-dimensional exploration. Politics, in its theoretical aspect, gives futurists and designers a sensitivity to power relations and a range of conceptions of the good and the just at the social level, and in its activist aspect, represents a tradition of exploring and concretely operationalising these ethics in the world. Designers give to futures and politics practitioners a much-needed dose of communications acumen and facility with media, along with a fusion of aesthetic (used here in the narrow sense) with the pragmatic; a necessary equilibrium between form and function.’

— Stuart Candy, ‘The Futures of Everyday Life‘ (2010)

Notes, annotations, links:

• My answer to the question, ‘What was it like to play Superstruct’?

• Our essay on ‘design futurescaping’ in Blowup: The Era of Objects

• Stuart Candy’s PhD thesis, ‘The Futures of Everyday Life‘

• Kevin Kelly on Scenius

• The London Hackspace

• Robin Sloan’s ‘Kanye West, Media Cyborg‘

• More on the hungry radio

• Thomas Thwaites’ Policing Genes

• Protei

• Cesar Harada at TEDxMidAtlantic

• Superflux’s write-up of ‘Pirates of the Danube’

• ‘Pirates of the Danube’ project outcomes

• Julijonas Urbonas’ website

• ‘Song of the Machine‘

• The Dremelfuge

• Jamais Cascio on ‘Legacy Futures’

• Neal Stephenson on the failures of innovation

• Bruce Sterling on our temporal horizons

I’ve spent most of the past month wrestling with the meaning and significance of this book; trying to work out what manner of beast it might be. A challenging task, with cascading revelations. To kick off, three observations:

1. Bruce Sterling is the Chairman – when it comes to his writing, I get all twitchy and excitable, with little possibility of critical distance.

2. Despite that, as a novel, The Caryatids (2009) is a conspicuous failure.

3. And despite this, I rate it as one of the most bold and important books of the last decade.

Caryatids? In classical architecture, a caryatid is a load-bearing pillar carved into a figurative sculpture of a woman. Something like this, from Athens’ Erechtheum:

photo credit: photographerglen

Sterling’s caryatids are a set of clones, born of and raised by the ubicomp-obsessed widow of a Balkan warlord as tech support for a looming environmental apocalypse:

‘They had been the great septet of caryatids: seven young women, superwomen, cherished and entirely special, designed and created for the single mighty purpose of averting the collapse of the world. They were meant to support and bear its every woe.’ (pp. 18-19)

Personally, this conceit read as nothing so much as an inversion of what-I-knew of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), in which all the smart, productive people abscond, triggering societal collapse. In The Caryatids, collapse precedes the titular superwomen, who are created to hold up the world.

In this, Bruce sets up the conditions for a fascinating thought experiment, a microcosm of the whole structure/agency thing. When the girls’ ubicomp-mediated upbringing is interrupted in an attack by Balkan guerillas, the survivors scatter. Like light through a prism, the novel’s trio of genetically-identical protagonists allow Sterling to deploy a strange twist on the three-act narrative, with each chunk representing a single, stand-alone story, or point of inflection.

In embracing this structure, the novel reads like the bastard offspring of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Shell’s Signals & Signposts (2011) – some cumbersome and wholly unexpected mix of soap opera, satire, technical manual, and manifesto.

• The first clone-sister, Vera, remains in the Balkans, doing some heavy lifting on an environmental remediation project, under the banner of the Acquis: a post-geographic civil society group populated by anarcho-communist, exoskeleton-clad cyborgs.

• Mila, the second sister, marries into the ‘Family-Firm’, a South Californian mafia, taking in ‘real estate, politics, finance, everyware, retail, water interests … and of course entertainment.’ (p. 92)

• The final clone, Sonja, is a soldier-slash-field-medic in China, ‘the largest and most powerful state left on Earth.’ (p. 185)

Three takes on the apocalypse: cyborg environmentalism, Californian dynasticism, and Statism ‘with Chinese characteristics’. In The Spectre of Ideology (1995), Žižek notes how, from the inside, it often seems…

‘easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than the end of than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe.’

In this, The Caryatids seems to have taken Žižek’s words as a direct challenge, with Bruce creating convincing, detailed visions of both. End of the world?

The Caryatids poses a scenario where, by 2060, climate change has resulted in a near-total collapse of state authority, leaving, as Doctorow puts it, ‘a slurry of refugees, rising seas, and inconceivable misery.’ The world as we know it is dead and buried.

Change in the means of production?

Well, none of the scenario-environments Bruce presents can realistically be seen as a continuation of the status quo. The Los Angeles chapter could, perhaps, be seen as a perverse iteration on start-up culture, but there seems to have been enough of a substantive change for it to represent something truly novel.

‘Brilliancy, speed, lightness, and glory‘ is a mantra we find repeated throughout the narrative, echoed by actors and agents from each of the political blocs. Within Acquis society, glory has been framed as the ultimate of virtues: ‘Glory was the source of communion. Glory was the spirit of the corps. Glory was a reason to be.’ (p. 47)

Seen against a background of environmental collapse, these Catholic values conjure some of Bruce’s earlier thoughts on something he dubbed ‘Gothic High-Tech‘:

‘In Gothic High-Tech, you’re Steve Jobs. You’ve built an iPhone which is a brilliant technical innovation, but you also had to sneak off to Tennessee to get a liver transplant because you’re dying of something secret and horrible.

And you’re a captain of American industry. You’re not some General Motors kinda guy. On the contrary, you’re a guy who’s got both hands on the steering wheel of a functional car.

But you’re still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting. And not a kindly death either, but a sinister, creeping, tainted wells of Silicon Valley kind of Superfund thing that steals upon you month by month, and that you have to hide from the public and from the bloggers and from the shareholders.

And you just grit your teeth and pull out the next one. A heroic story, but very Gothic. Something that belongs in an eighteenth century horror novel. Kind of the “man in the castle” figure.’

photo credit: pittpanthersfan

This reassertion of a catholic-gothic sensibility is something I have explored elsewhere in relation to domestic and homeland (in)security. In Caryatids, Bruce links the catholic-gothic thing to science fiction’s origins in the romantic tales of Mary Shelly and her ilk. In the words of Vera’s confidant, aiming for something close to reassurance: “You can’t convince us that you’re the big secret monster from the big secret monster lab. Because we know you, and we know how you feel.” (p. 21)

We can see it in anxieties about the impact of new technologies on what it means to be human, with some kind of public broadcast of brain activity amongst the Acquis fundamentally changing the nature of sociality and group identity: ‘These were people made visible from the inside out, and that visibility was changing them. Vera knew that the sensorweb was melting them inside, just as it was melting the island’s soil, the seas, even the skies …’ (p. 26)

In this world, an individual’s relationship to technology is characterised by ambivalence, suspicion, and a wholly gothic dependence. ‘The Acquis and the Dispension hated China’s state secrecy, for they were obsessed with rogue technologies spinning out of control. Internal combustion: a rogue technology spun out of control. Electric light: a rogue technology spun out of control. Fossil fuel: the flesh of the necromantic dead, risen from its grave, had wrecked the planet.’ (p. 230)

This catholic-gothic tendency also manifests in the protagonists’ total and instinctive loathing for each other, a detail rooted in the uncanny self-annihilatory narratives of shapeshifters, body-snatchers and doppelgängers, and something Sterling leverages to great effect.

But this is, ultimately, a story of redemption; redemption and agency. It plays with some of the worst-case scenarios for the unfolding climate crisis, and then shows some ways in which, despite everything, humanity might be able to claw its way back from the brink. It’s one of several books I could cite that, post-2000, have begun to refresh our vocabulary of the future, with the potential to shift talk away from the simple-minded narratives of collapse and technological salvation – stories we use to absolve ourselves of agency and responsibility.

photo credit: Konrad Hädener

Working with a novum-packed narrative, Sterling focuses on the fallibility and inadequacy of the superstar, the wunderkind, and the auteur. Despite everything, this is a decidedly anti-heroic book. The clone-sisters are twisted fuck-ups. Deployed as ‘agents of redemption’, the weight on their shoulders leaves them febrile, erratic, and riddled with neuroses.

The real solutions are in the systems of participation; superstructures capable of supporting a raft of increasingly radical projects. In the words of Californian wunderkind Lionel, the answer is openness: such radical projects “need widespread distributed oversight, with peer review and loyal opposition to test them. They have to be open and testable.” (p. 252)

Chinese state secrecy isn’t the answer. Despite it’s pretensions, the can-do attitude of the Californian ‘military-entertainment complex’ falters, powerless, in the face of earthquakes and volcanoes. And the European techno-anarchists, however seductive their vision, are an ‘extremist group’ practicing ‘sensory totalitarianism’ to brainwash climate refugees.

Of course.

Whatever the novel’s narrative flaws, the first chapter is worth the price of admission, as a near-perfect combination of worldbuilding, character and cognitive estrangement.

Overall? Compelling and transformative, shot through with veins of disarming sincerity, The Caryatids is part second-hand motorboat, part Viking funerary barge. Departing the harbour, it sputters and flames. Then it sinks.

But by that point, it’s already rewired your brain.

photo credit: David Boyle

Disclaimer: I’m not a designer, I just work with them.

Bruce Sterling (2009):

When science fiction was born from its radio-parts catalogs, design was also born as the streamlined handmaiden of industry. (…) But these two sister disciplines, born within the same decade and surely for similar reasons, soon parted ways. The sisters were distantly cordial; but they saw no common purpose.
Design, which is industrial, has clients and consumers, while science fiction, an art form, has patrons and an audience.

An ethics of design fiction?

I asked the question, and Adam answered with something that triggered a deep, visceral unease, for reasons I found hard to qualify.

~ not so much that he missed the point, as that he missed my point, hitting back with a diatribe on the complicity of design fiction in consumerism, as an annexation of fiction by corporate R&D and, more sweepingly, the market …

Not untrue, whatever my issues with his argument. At its least objectionable, we can see this tendency in Intel’s Morrow Project, and the strange feedback loops between Minority Report and the Kinect.

Whatever else it may be, design fiction is propositional.

So, is there room for a propositional ethics of design fiction?

Turning our eye to the role of design under conditions of post-Fordism, collapsonomics. The role of design outside the market. The role of design in foresight, and of foresight in design.

Scott Smith (2011):

A common characteristic of these creators is a facility to take a nascent technological capability and bend it around a moral, ethical or social issue, intentionally or as by-product, and thereby provide a useful thinking space to model implications and consequences. They continually ask questions about what it means to attempt to put emotion into technology, and by doing this, they create and explore hundreds of mini-scenarios of a human-technological future. Whether you agree or disagree with particular views of how these futures may unfold, the questions need asking, if only to provide a better sense of the direction(s) we wish to pursue.

‘Be the change you can, and simulate the rest’ (Stuart Candy, 2011)

Simulation is a big word.

As ever, the opposition isn’t virtual/real, but real = virtual+actual.

Without framing or labelling, seeded in the real world, such objects and material scenarios blend awkwardly into their surroundings. Fiction passing as truth. The closet of the (un)real.

So, when I talk of an ethics of design fiction, I’m really asking: to what extent is this thing we call design fiction built on deceit? What of consent? Is this even a problem?

Here, I turn to Jane McGonigal’s PhD thesis, This Might Be A Game – where she briefly touches on the Lumiere brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) as a case study for the performance of credulity.

This pioneering short film is an anchor the oft-repeated origin myth of film studies, in which, startled by the sudden appearance of an approaching train, a significant chunk of the original audience were reported to have screamed, fainted and fled the theatre.

A parable on the dangers of immersive media … and a myth soundly demolished by film historian Tom Gunning.

McGonigal (2006):

‘Gunning rejected the idea of an audience cowed by the cinema’s then unprecedented illusionist power, proposing instead that spectators were engaged in a sophisticated, self-aware suspension of disbelief. By feigning belief during their first filmic encounters, Gunning suggested, viewers framed their own experience, willfully playing along with the director. (…)

Today, as a result of Gunning’s work, the vast majority of film scholars reject the once-prevalent notion of panicked, passive, and hyper-receptive audiences. They recognize, instead, that the earliest filmgoers were playful and intentional participants in the creation and maintenance of cinematic illusion.’

Alternate reality games as the performance of credulity. Conspicuous consumption as the performance of affluence.

Could we unhitch conspicuousness and consumption? A world of Potemkin products; after the Potemkin village.

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A bright green, propositional design fiction?

To paraphrase Bruce: When will you be more environmentally friendly than your dead great-grandfather?

When all you consume is Potemkin products, made mostly of stories? When your furniture is future fab-feed? When your possessions and keepsakes have been digitised and uploaded to the cloud, continuing to be felt in your life as the imprint of so many semiotic ghosts?

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What can we say about thinking in public?

Design fictioneers as Sloanean media cyborgs par excellence, subsisting in those places where reality is at its thinnest.

The nascent role of the ‘in-house bard’ and the cult of the auteur.

Performativity, as ‘that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.’ (Judith Butler, 1993)

The disproportionate agency of certain non-human actants, when those actants are films, gizmos, hoaxes, or exhibits.

That uncanny sense of not being able to work out whether or not something is real, of not being able to feel out the joins between fact and fiction. Whispers of ontological uncertainty.

What, after all, is produced by design fiction?

Affect, belief, desire, conversations, discourse, fear, unease.

The technological imaginary?

The future?

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If they’re actually enacting the future, should design fictioneers have to work under a warning label? A kite mark, disavowing the reality of said artifact or film clip. A footnote, aknowledging the lack of a supporting material substrate.

And if not, why not?

Exquisitely shot footage, part of ‘Solar Sinter’, a final project from RCA graduate Markus Kayser. How’s that for sense-of-wonder?

((Echoes of Magnus Larsson’s bacterial dune-cement, Rachel Armstrong’s limestone-secreting Venetian protocells, Cesar Harada’s oil spill cleaning robots, and Project LiloRann. Apparently, our century’s mega-engineering is molar, scalable, and crowd-supported.))

photo credit: justinpickard

Following last week’s introduction to Project Cascadia (and accompanying reading list), I thought I’d share a couple of passages that have been firmly lodged in my brain this week.

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First, the very beginning of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, an extraordinary novel-slash-history of Soviet cybernetics. In this extract, the author grapples with some of the peculiarities and nuance of his writing:

‘This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved. The idea is the hero. It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindred by others.’

– Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010), p. 3.

(‘The idea is the hero.‘ How do you approach a biography of an idea? An idea of a region; a utopia; shared – at some vague, subconscious level – by millions of people? Approached obliquely … glimpsed through gaps, and attacked from strange angles? Ambushed with some strange hybrid of fact and fiction? Hmm.)

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Secondly, a couple of lines from Wild Bill Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum‘; a meditation on legacy futures in the form of a short story:

‘She was talking about those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.’

– William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Burning Chrome (1988), pp. 38-39.

(‘Segments of a dreamworld.’ Hunting traces … gathering evidence … detective work, pinning down the imaginary and the nebulous in something tangible. The process of documenting the imaginary drives Gibson’s photojournalist protagonist to the brink of madness, as he begins to slip sideways into the obsolete retro-future he’s been sent to document. It’s an excellent short story, and a key insipiration for some of my earliest work on this project.)

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photo credit: justinpickard

And, finally, the opening lines from Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, a strange, tangential, and exhaustively-referenced biography of Los Angeles:

‘The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llana del Rio – Open Shop Los Angeles’s utopian antipode – you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake.’

– Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990), p. 3.

(‘From the ruins of its alternative future.‘ If you want to understand the ways things will turn out, you have to understand what’s already failed, and why? These are words that echo (rhyme with?) Sterling’s oft-repeated aphorism: ‘The ruins of the unsustainable are the twenty-first century’s frontier.’ The mission, then, is to locate sites where the past and future collide with an unexpected ferocity, bringing long-buried cultural detritus to the surface. Atemporality, located in space.)

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More to follow, in time.

photo credit: justinpickard

Venture ethnography | Speculative travel writing | Territorial futures

Introducing Project Cascadia: my attempt to bootstrap a new(ish) mode of writing into existence.

3–6 weeks in North America’s Pacific Northwest, in search of traces of Cascadia. Fodder for a series of essays and investigations. Presented in a book. Crowdfunded by you; the proud and attractive people of the internet.

For the tl;dr among you, there’s a an easy blurb and video here –  enough to you give you a sense of the shape of the thing. Go, chuckle at my unkempt appearance and poor grasp of audio syncing!

Then, for more in the way of detail (a lot more), join me below…

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Project Cascadia is the test-case for a cluster of ideas I’ve been playing with for the best part of five years. A chance to break out my signature obsessions …

Hauntings, world expos, gonzo journalism, science fiction, systems, geopolitics, utopianism, virtuality, globalisation, the sublime, resilience, collapsonomics, aesthetics, architecture, environmentalism, infrastructure, design, futures studies, sovereignty, atemporality, risk, the nation-state, the uncanny, Americana, technoscience, cyberpunk, multispecies ethnography, fiction, capitalism, the human senses, counterfactual history, media and cyborgs (and media cyborgs)

… and nail them to the mast of a weird and interstitial sort of boat; a soupy, hybrid writing practice that would combine the best of ethnography, journalism and science fiction.

Trips to San Francisco (2009), Iceland (2010), and Dublin (2011) demonstrated my incapability of approach travel in any kind of ‘normal’ way. A born infovore, I kept getting caught up in the minutae, symbolism, and historical specificity of the place, and ended up ambushing tour guides with questions about medieval property law and taking lots of photos of construction hoardings.

Part of this is down to a strange education, with a joint honours degree in Anthropology and International Relations (blending the local and the global), and a masters in Digital Media.

Both of these programmes allowed me the freedom to shoehorn in all kinds of stuff, adding science fiction to offshore finance; american literature to biotechnology; and penning essays on the aesthetics of Guantanamo Bay, the Principality of Sealand, airports, post-colonial Mumbai, and Richard Kelly’s cult masterpiece/traversty Southland Tales (2007).

In lieu of a biography, then, I’m offering a bibliography. Five years of my brain, in books, articles, essays, and blog posts. I fully expect this to be a forest of broken links by this time next week, but, in the meantime, it should begin to give you an idea of where I stand … and, yes, why I might be doing this.

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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983)

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996)

‘Spectral housing and urban cleansing: notes on millennial Mumbai‘, Public Culture 12:3 (2000)

Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992)

J. G. Ballard, Vermillion Sands (1971)

‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island‘ (Guardian podcast)

Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (2007)

Nigel Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes From a Mud Hut (1983)

Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)

America (1986)

Lauren Beukes, Zoo City (2010)

Moxyland (2008)

Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991)

Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (2006)

John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Jamais Cascio, ‘Legacy Futures‘, Open the Future (2008)

‘Three Possible Economic Models‘, Fast Company (2009)

‘Three Possible Economic Models, Part 2‘, Fast Company (2009)

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (1975)

Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends (2008)

Jean and John Comaroff, ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101:4 (2002)

‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming‘, Public Culture 12:2 (2000)

‘Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony’, American Ethnologist 26:2 (1999)

Douglas Coupland, ‘A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years‘, Globe and Mail (2010)

Generation A (2009)

JPod (2006)

Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (2004)

Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990)

Cory Doctorow, Makers (2009)

Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (2005)

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)

Warren Ellis, Shivering Sands (2009)

Matthew Gandy, ‘Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City‘, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29:1 (2005)

Bradley L. Garrett, ‘Urban explorers: quests for myth, mystery and meaning’, Geography Compass (2010) [video]

Place Hacking (2008-present)

William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Burning Chrome (1986)

Zero History (2010)

Spook Country (2007)

Pattern Recognition (2003)

David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (2007)

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004)

Adam Greenfield, ‘Thoughts for an eleventh September: Alvin Toffler, Hirohito, Sarah Palin‘, Speedbird (2008)

Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010)

Charlie Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space (2009)

Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (2007)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™ (1997)

Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1990)

Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009)

Dan Hill, ‘The Street as Platform‘, City of Sound (2008)

Drew Jacob, ‘How to be ExPoMod‘, Most Interesting People in the Room

Sarah Kember, ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis‘, Culture Machine (2010)

Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002)

Alan Klima, ‘Spirits of ‘Dark Finance’: A Local Hazard for the International Moral Fund’, Cultural Dynamics (2006)

‘Thai Love Thai: Financing Emotion in Post-crash Thailand‘, Ethnos (2004)

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991)

Ursula Le Guin, Changing Planes (2003)

The Disposessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

Geoff Manaugh, The BLDGBLOG Book (2009)

Ian McDonald, The Dervish House (2010)

Brasyl (2007)

River of Gods (2004)

Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004)

China Mieville, The City & the City (2009)

‘Covehithe‘, The Guardian (2011)

‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire – Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?‘, Collapse IV (2008)

‘Floating Utopias‘, In These Times (2007)

Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (2002)

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Keith Roberts, Pavane (1968)

Jim Rossignol, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities (2008)

Geoff Ryman, Air (2005)

Stephen Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (2010)

Gary Shtenyngart, Super Sad True Love Story (2010)

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010)

Bruce Sterling, The Caryatids (2009)

‘Designer Futurescape‘, Make 18 (2009)

‘Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future‘, Wired (2007)

Holy Fire (1996)

Islands in the Net (1988)

‘State of the World, 20––‘, The Well (2001-present)

Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? (2009)

‘Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism in the War on Terror‘, Critical Inquiry 34:S2 (2008)

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

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There you go; everything interesting and/or relevant I’ve read in the last half-decade. *jazz hands*

In the second part of this cynically self-promotional series, to follow sometime in the next week, I’ll start to weave some of the items from this list into something more useful and cohesive, and begin looking at what this hybrid form of writing might actually look like. Join me then.