Oral Presentation Session

Invited by: Digital Anthropologies Interest Group

Primary Theme: Technology

(2-0610) Inter-topia: Productive tensions within the collisions of techno-utopianism and techno-dystopianism (Invited Session: Digital Anthropologies Interest Group (DANG))

Sites of digital technology development are immersed in competing techno-utopian and -dystopian ideologies that frame how technologies are imagined, funded, produced, distributed, and consumed. Techno-utopian ideologies foreground the transformative capacities of digital technologies to accelerate ideal futures and thus fuel investment in technological solutions and produce excitement in users and consumers. Techno-dystopian ideologies challenge this optimism by identifying the neoliberal underpinnings of these future imaginaries and the collateral damage left in the wake of their transformations. These ideologies are often framed in narratives that oppose critical scholarship against techno-utopian elites of Silicon Valley or neoliberal bureaucrats producing techno-solutionist policy (Pfeilstetter 2017). We suggest that techno-utopian and -dystopian ideologies are not descriptive of these communities but are instead distributed across them as future scenarios (Hannerz 2016) that are recruited, exploited, and avoided along the way to ends that are not techno-utopian or -dystopian but rather an emergent product of both.
This panel seeks to draw on ethnographic fieldwork within sites of digital technology development to unsettle the preoccupation with techno-utopian and -dystopian description to reveal the creative and subversive work of actors within these fieldsites that this preoccupation obscures. Through this approach, we do not seek to dismiss the important critiques embedded within techno-dystopian approaches or the optimism of techno-utopianism. But rather, we seek to illustrate the productive tensions, resistances, and adaptations that arise in the collisions of these scenarios within digital technology development.

Organizer(s)

• Jeremy Trombley

  University of Maryland

Presenter(s)

• Jeremy Trombley

  University of Maryland

• Darcy Pan

  Post-doctoral research fellow
  Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University

Organizer(s)

• Angela VandenBroek

  PhD Candidate
  Binghamton University, State University of New York

Chair(s)

• Angela VandenBroek

  PhD Candidate
  Binghamton University, State University of New York

Presenter(s)

• Angela VandenBroek

  PhD Candidate
  Binghamton University, State University of New York

• Nick Seaver

  Assistant Professor
  Tufts University

• Grant Otsuki

  Lecturer
  Victoria University of Wellington

Discussant(s)

• Shreeharsh Kelkar

  Lecturer
  Interdisciplinary Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Presentations:

• 4:30 PM - 6:15 PM

  “We’re going to change the world with that meaningless buzzword”: Innovation and social entrepreneurship in Stockholm’s startup ecosystem
  Angela Kristin VandenBroek – Binghamton University, State University of New York
• 4:30 PM - 6:15 PM

  All Models are Wrong, But Some are Intertopian
  Jeremy M. Trombley – University of Maryland
• 4:30 PM - 6:15 PM

  Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens: Intertopian reason in the age of the celestial jukebox
  Nick Seaver – Tufts University
• 4:30 PM - 6:15 PM

  Human-Machine Interfacing as Utopian Practice in Japan
  Grant J. Otsuki – Victoria University of Wellington
• 4:30 PM - 6:15 PM

  Making a big data valley in the mountains of Guizhou
  Darcy Pan – Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University