This paper delves into the concept of the uncanny, a theme that has fascinated scholars across multiple disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, literature, and film studies. The study’s primary goal is twofold: to examine the theoretical foundations of the uncanny as explored by Jentsch, Freud, and Heidegger, and to propose a new perspective on the uncanny within the context of modern technological and urban developments. The paper argues that urban, technologically advanced environments foster conditions in which the uncanny can easily emerge, (...) and suggests that the adoption of a techno-scientific worldview plays a central role in the rise of uncanny experiences. Through an analysis of Hoffmann’s The Sandman, this paper revisits classical theories of the uncanny and connects them with contemporary realities. Jentsch’s emphasis on cognitive uncertainty, Freud’s exploration of repressed traumatic memories, and Heidegger’s focus on the broader atmospheric conditions of the uncanny are all examined. The paper concludes by reflecting on how urbanization, technological dependency, and scientific reductionism contribute to a profound sense of alienation, increasing the likelihood of uncanny experiences in the modern world. (shrink)

Social robots are marketed as human tools promising us a better life. This marketing strategy commodifies not only the labor of care but the caregiver as well, conjuring a fantasy of technoliberal futurism that echoes a colonial past. Against techno-utopian fantasies of a good life as one involving engineered domestic help, I draw here on the techno-dystopian television show Humans (stylized HUMⱯNS) to suggest that we should find our desires for such help unsettling. At the core of (...) my argument is a return of the “uncanny valley” problem, from its reformulation as an engineering/design problem to its origins as a psychosocial symptom of an unresolved, traumatic past. I conclude that our sense of the uncanny may be best understood as a moral capacity that should be honed rather than evaded. (shrink)

This review presents a systematic reading of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, as part of a larger project to develop a techno-social ontology of place/s. Arguing against universalising theories of time and space, including Sloterdijk’s own conception of Spheres as ‘Being and Space’, this essay reads the trilogy through a ‘platial’ framework. While commenting on some of the shortcomings of the official English translations, the three volumes are being worked through methodically – Bubbles (micro spherology), Globes (macro spherology) and (...) Foams (plural spherology) – by placing particular emphasis on the third book, where Sloterdijk’s logic of spheres converges. The essay concludes by pointing out the limitation of Spheres as (philosophical) anthropology. (shrink)

This Article examines a constitutional problem that largely goes unnoticed and unexamined by legal scholars — the problem of technosocial engineering of humans. After defining terms and explaining the nature of the problem, I explain how techno-social engineering of humans is easily ignored, as we perform constrained cost-benefit analyses of incremental steps without contemplating the path we are on. I begin with two nonfiction stories, one involving techno-social engineering of human emotions and a second involving technosocial (...) engineering of children’s preferences. The stories highlight incremental steps down a path. Then, through plausible fictional extensions, I explore steps further down the path. The Article ends with a fact pattern familiar to every reader. It explains how the electronic contracting environment we experience regularly online is an example of techno-social engineering of humans with the intended consequence of nudging humans to behave like machines — perfectly rational, predictable, and ultimately programmable. (shrink)

The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, Peele creates (...) a resistance image, i.e., an image that resists the historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man. (shrink)

Philosophical work exploring the relation between cognition and the Internet is now an active area of research. Some adopt an externalist framework, arguing that the Internet should be seen as environmental scaffolding that drives and shapes cognition. However, despite growing interest in this topic, little attention has been paid to how the Internet influences our affective life — our moods, emotions, and our ability to regulate these and other feeling states. We argue that the Internet scaffolds not only cognition but (...) also affect. Using various case studies, we consider some ways that we are increasingly dependent on our Internet-enabled “techno-social niches” to regulate the contours of our own affective life and participate in the affective lives of others. We argue further that, unlike many of the other environmental resources we use to regulate affect, the Internet has distinct properties that introduce new dimensions of complexity to these regulative processes. First, it is radically social in a way many of these other resources are not. Second, it is a radically distributed and decentralized resource; no one individual or agent is responsible for the Internet’s content or its affective impact on users. Accordingly, while the Internet can profoundly augment and enrich our affective life and deepen our connection with others, there is also a distinctive kind of affective precarity built into our online endeavors as well. (shrink)

Drawing on data from a comparative ethnographic study on media usage in transnational families, this paper contributes to a reappraisal of polymedia theory. Two main theoretical assumptions are reconsidered. First, it is demonstrated why the equal availability assumption has to be revised in light of the complex interactions between the corporeal, communicative and social mobilities which together constitute transnational migration. Second, it is argued that the techno-socially accomplished co-presence in transnational families depends more on the creative appropriation and (...) combination of different media channels and communication forms than on the choice between them. In order to empirically investigate the specific needs for, and forms of co-presence in families, the concept of ‘registers of presence’ is proposed. It allows us to understand in detail in what ways and in which constellations transnational families create togetherness with the help of communication technologies. (shrink)

This article synthesizes the current theoretical attempts to understand human-machine interactions and introduces seven premises to understand our emerging dynamics with increasingly competent, pervasive, and instantly accessible algorithms. The hope that these seven premises can build toward a social theory of human-AI cocreation. The focus on human-AI cocreation is intended to emphasize two factors. First, is the fact that our machine learning systems are socialized. Second, is the coevolving nature of human mind and AI systems as smart devices form (...) an indispensable part of our cognitive scaffolds, thus, shaping how we perceive the world and ourselves. The seven premises include: primacy of social structures; human’s desire for freedom and autonomy; AI systems will form inseparable parts of our cognitive/affective scaffolds and can change our self-understanding; philosophy and humanistic foundations on human flourishing as a guide to human-AI interaction; mindsponge information-filtering process; acculturative process of how values change and emerge from human-AI interaction; overlapping Venn diagram of the human-human, human-nature, and human-machine interactions. This article concludes with a discussion on human agency in our entanglements with socialized machines and the illusoriness of the Cartesian agent view of the mind. (shrink)

The development of robots that closely resemble human beings can contribute to cognitive research. An android provides an experimental apparatus that has the potential to be controlled more precisely than any human actor. However, preliminary results indicate that only very humanlike devices can elicit the broad range of responses that people typically direct toward each other. Conversely, to build androids capable of emulating human behavior, it is necessary to investigate social activity in detail and to develop models of the (...) cognitive mechanisms that support this activity. Because of the reciprocal relationship between android development and the exploration of social mechanisms, it is necessary to establish the field of android science. Androids could be a key testing ground for social, cognitive, and neuroscientific theories as well as platform for their eventual unification. Nevertheless, subtle flaws in appearance and movement can be more apparent and eerie in very humanlike robots. This uncanny phenomenon may be symptomatic of entities that elicit our model of human other but do not measure up to it. If so, very humanlike robots may provide the best means of pinpointing what kinds of behavior are perceived as human, since deviations from human norms are more obvious in them than in more mechanical-looking robots. In pursuing this line of inquiry, it is essential to identify the mechanisms involved in evaluations of human likeness. One hypothesis is that, by playing on an innate fear of death, an uncanny robot elicits culturally-supported defense responses for coping with death’s inevitability. An experiment, which borrows from methods used in terror management research, was performed to test this hypothesis. [Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators: Fast Breaking Paper in Social Sciences, May 2008]. (shrink)

While COVID-19 has taken a toll on many professions and livelihood of all walks of lives, technology has amplified its intrusion to ease the necessities. Innovative technology, therefore, has improved the glitches and provided the software to adhere to these new normal. However, individuals' awareness and attitude toward the advancements of these technological trends need to be addressed. Although the government has taken measures to prevent and curb the growing cases for COVID-19 with the help of technology, the support from (...) the individuals would depend mostly on their level of awareness and the attitude toward those measures. The present qualitative study explored the techno trend awareness, perception and attitudes of techno experts and technical professionals toward social connectedness and mitigating factors of COVID-19. Besides, it also explained individuals' shift toward virtual interaction to maintain social connections during the pandemic. The thematic analysis generated four prominent themes. Social Connectedness, emphasized on the emotional connections that created a positive feeling of belongingness. Technological Advancement provided three sub-themes highlighting perception, techno trend awareness and desirable attitudes toward the mitigation of COVID-19. The categories under Treatment and Preventive Measures indicated the enhanced self-care of individuals and also the tendencies to minimize the spread of diseases. The emergence of the theme Inclination toward Indigenous Knowledge, which is an important finding, indicated the techno-experts inclination toward the indigenous knowledge amid vague scientific shreds of evidence. (shrink)

Nostalgic, socially privileged ideals of childhood have actively contributed to the formation of Australian national identity, as well as modern subject-formations more broadly. This paper argues that, while such nostalgia has been drawn on for normative ends—in the service of the management of the modern individual—nostalgia also has the power to disrupt our conceptions of the normal. In the context of the contemporary “crisis” of childhood particularly, opportunities to reconstitute ideals of “childhood” and “family” differently have become available to communities (...) such as Aboriginal Australians, who previously have been denied access to these nostalgic forms. (shrink)

Social robots are increasingly used in different areas of society such as public health, elderly care, education, and commerce. They have also been successfully employed in autism spectrum disorders therapy with children. Humans strive to find in them not only assistants but also friends. Although forms and functionalities of such robots vary, there is a strong tendency to anthropomorphize artificial agents, making them look and behave as human as possible and imputing human attributes to them. The more human a (...) robot looks, the more appealing it will be considered by humans. However, this linear link between likeness and liking only holds to the point where a feeling of strangeness and eeriness emerges. We discuss possible explanations of this so-called uncanny valley phenomenon that emerges in human–robot interaction. We also touch upon important ethical questions surrounding human–robot interaction in different social settings, such as elderly care or autism spectrum disorders therapy. (shrink)

Techno-colonialism, which I argue here to specifically mean the transfer of technology and its values and norms from one locale to another, has become a serious concern with the advancement of socially disruptive technologies1 of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), like artificial intelligence and robots. While the transfer of technology from one locale, especially economically advanced countries, to developing countries comes with economic benefits for both regions, it is important to understand that technologies are not value- neutral; they come (...) with the values, cultures, and worldviews of their designers. However, despite the nonvalue-neutrality of the technologies of the 4IR, they are still relevant for subSaharan Africa’s development. Thus, using a phenomenological approach, especially the sub-Saharan African experiences of past histories of colonialism, I prescribe cautionary measures that sub-Saharan Africans ought to take in approaching the current industrial revolution and its technologies. (shrink)

Can technology resolve social problems by reducing them to engineering challenges? In the 1960s, Alvin Weinberg answered yes, popularizing the term “techno-fix” in the process. The concept was immediately criticized and over time evolved into a disparaging term—a synonym for unrealistic technological proposals and their advocates. As the debate progressed, skepticism grew to include condemnation of a related term: “techno-solutionism.” Despite extensive criticism, both “techno-fix” and “techno-solutionism” remain ill-defined concepts. In this article, we provide more (...) precise definitions and clearly distinguish between techno-fixes and techno-solutionism through conceptual engineering. By refining these concepts, we aim to advance the discussion and lay the groundwork for more productive analyses of the role of technology in solving social problems. (shrink)

This essay presents an ethnographic account of two divorced Catholic women's memories of praying to the Virgin Mary while seeking illegal abortions under the Romanian socialist regime. These women's stories focused on troubling memories of being in love, reflections that were retrospectively shaped by divorce. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's notion of the uncanny, I call these recollections uncanny memories of the self in love. Uncannily remembering one's self in love combines experiential self-examination and ethical assessment of actions. The notion of (...) the uncanny self in love thus helps bridge the divide between experience- and action-oriented approaches to lived ethics. I argue that the ethical significance of the Virgin Mary's actions depended on my acquaintances’ approach to love. For one woman seeking to stay estranged from her ex-husband, the Virgin Mary's actions accentuated his ethical immaturity. My other acquaintance harbored more ambivalent feelings toward her ex-husband; for her, talking about the Virgin Mary helped her relativize feelings of ethical indignation. As a core implication of this argument, I urge greater awareness of the problematic tendency to include the need for greater awareness of tendencies in theories of lived ethics to reify socially situated perspectives on love. (shrink)

Allen Buchanan has argued for a linking of the ethics of human enhancement to the ethics of development more generally. The promise of the ‘enhancement enterprise' is that it may help develop society, just as other technological advances have in the past. He proposes a framework of intellectual property rights, government action to ensure the poor can access the enhancements, an international organization to administer the diffusion of new enhancement technologies from the West to poor countries, and the diffusion within (...) countries to the poorer populations. I take seriously his proposal of discussing biomedical enhancement in terms of the ethics of development. On these grounds of assessment, I argue that his proposal is politically conservative. To make the case, I distinguish conservatism in ethics from conservatism in politics; and I contextualize the proposal against the background of development economics and the neoliberal approach to development. (shrink)

What is the normative import of telling a genealogy of our present reason-giving practices? In this paper, I will focus on Michel Foucault’s materialist genealogies in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, which attend to the social and material settings in which we act and give and ask for reasons. A number of influential critics have interpreted them as a critical evaluation of our reason-giving practices. But understood in this way, Foucault’s genealogical project faces significant (...) philosophical problems. I will sketch a different account, arguing that telling a genealogy can have an uncanny effect: It can disrupt our familiarity with the everyday world by revealing to us the embodied norms that structure our everyday activities. Once we recognize that our situation is structured by normative demands, we cannot simply let ourselves be carried along by found norms. Genealogies call on us to take responsibility for these norms and to practically transform the space in which we act. (shrink)

This is the story of a seductive idea and its sobering consequences. The twentieth century brought a new cultural confidence in the social powers of invention – but also saw the advance of consumerism, world wars, globalisation and human-generated climate change. Techno-Fixers traces how passive optimism and active manipulations were linked to our growing trust in technological innovation. It pursues the evolving idea through engineering hubris, radical utopian movements, science fiction fanzines, policy-maker soundbites, corporate marketing, and consumer culture. (...) It explores how evangelists of technological fixes have proselytised their faith, and critically examines the examples and products of their followers. The new technological confidence mixed together beliefs that were simultaneously compelling and unsettling. As motor vehicles, electricity supplies and radio became part of modern life in the early decades of the century, it was hard to argue against the transformative effects and inevitability of such transitions. Like it or not, social consequences seemed to come inexorably with the Machine Age, the Space Age and the Information Age. This deterministic vision implied an ever more technological future with unavoidable social consequences. For many, innovative technologies promised appealing new lifestyles and powers. But for a narrower band of proponents – the first generation of technological fixers – wise engineering invention was touted as a guaranteed route to positive human benefits and societal progress. Socially-engaged engineers and designers argued that such improvements could be directed, hastened and amplified. These engineering adventurers argued that modern societies could be guided only by rational designers. They contended that adroit technological solutions could solve contemporary problems better than any traditional method, including economic initiatives, citizen education, political ideology, lifestyle changes, legal frameworks and moral guidance. Their seductive claims were tamed by more mainstream American enthusiasts, and eventually boiled down to the concept of the technological fix. Their shared confidence infused policy-makers, broadcasters and science popularisers. Trust in technological fixes shaped a new generation of managers and law-makers, engineers and educators, futurists and citizens – and continues to drive a new generation of techno-fixers today. This cultural wave, its promoters and detractors, have championed the promise and voiced concerns that we have inherited, still unresolved. This book tracks the hubristic influencers and weighs up the confidences and concerns associated with them: the dramatic potential for novel technologies to work alongside longer human traditions to meet our enduring ambitions – or to reshape society for the worse. (shrink)

This article examines some of the implications of technological optimism. I first contextualize, historically and culturally, some contemporary variants of techno-optimism in relation to the equally significant contemporary exemplars of techno-pessimism, skepticism and fatalism. I show that this techno-optimism is often instrumentalized in the sense that the optimistic outlook as such is believed to have some influence on the evolving state of affairs. The cogency of this assumption is scrutinized. I argue that in the absence of explicit (...) probabilities, such optimism presupposes some form of retro-causation, where the future is held to somehow have a retroactive effect on the past. This suggests that the underlying mechanism by which techno-optimism is supposed to be instrumental in bringing about the future is fundamentally superstitious. Such superstition, of course, goes against our common understanding of reason and rationality, for adopting rational expectations about the world requires that we avoid the emotional over-determination of our assessments. I show that applied reason is conceptually entangled with this superstitious optimism in the continued successes of technology. The article thus reveals a curious sense in which reason is intrinsically superstitious. I offer an evolutionary explanation for this, showing that the biological origins of reason will by nature tend to produce rational agents which are superstitiously bound to realism and causality, and thus implicitly optimistic about technology’s capacity to overcome contingency. (shrink)

Quantification is particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty. Not surprisingly, numbers, indicators, categorizations, and comparisons are central to governmental and popular response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay draws insights from critical data studies, sociology of quantification and decolonial thinking, with occasional excursion into the biomedical domain, to investigate the role and social consequences of counting broadly defined as a way of knowing about the virus. It takes a critical look at two domains of human activity that play (...) a central role in the fight against the virus outbreak, namely medical sciences and technological innovation. It analyzes their efforts to craft solutions for their user base and explores the unwanted social costs of these operations. The essay argues that the over-reliance of biomedical research on “whiteness” for lab testing and the techno-solutionism of the consumer infrastructure devised to curb the social costs of the pandemic are rooted in a distorted idea of a “standard human” based on a partial and exclusive vision of society and its components, which tends to overlook alterity and inequality. It contends that to design our way out of the pandemic, we ought to make space for distinct ways of being and knowing, acknowledging plurality and thinking in terms of social relations, alterity, and interdependence. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical response to Fredrik Svenaeus’ use of the Heideggerian uncanny to analyse the experience of illness. It is argued that the uncanny is part of a culture of concepts through which the condition of modernity has been analysed by philosophers, social theorists, writers and artists. All centre upon the idea of alienation, and thus not being at home in the society that should be one’s home. This association will be exploited to offer a reinterpretation of (...) Svenaeus’ thesis as a sociological and political, rather than an ontological, one. By reviewing the work of Hegelian philosophers, Georg Simmel, and novelists, represented by Mann, Camus and McCullers, it will be argued that illness is bound up with social alienation, both as something that is caused by conditions of alienation and as an interpretative response to alienation. Seeing illness as a metaphor of the human condition in modernity allows the medical humanities to inform therapy, that would allow the patient to understand their illness, not as the ontological condition of Dasein, but rather as something mediated by modern social, economic and political conditions. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss the reports and results of recent official studies of UFOs, and argue they may pose a challenge to contemporary science, religion, and secularity. While the question of UFOs has been well addressed with respect to religion, this essay, which is also a report on current research, highlights the challenge to secularity and some of its constitutive practices. It aims to show how current knowledge on UFOs renders both science and religion uncanny, placing them in a (...) domain where they become irreducibly strange while unshakably familiar, pushing us to (re)consider some of the secular premises of the social sciences (e.g., anthropology) and the humanities (e.g., religious studies), and the possible need for new analytics. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that an encounter with a tick can produce both fear and wonder. I make a distinction between the legitimate danger of tick borne-diseases and the non-danger of our entanglement with the nature revealed by the tick’s bite in order to highlight the goodness of the tick and the possibilities for post-human existences beyond narratives of conquest and control. Ultimately, I argue that wonder is a helpful mechanism for thinking through the goodness of the tick by (...) allowing an ungrounding of our assumptions about climate change, hospitality, and the danger of non-human agencies. (shrink)

This essay attempts a critical analysis of the boom in 'uncanny' theory. As the 'uncanny' has carved its image in cultural, political, sociological and aesthetic theory, there has been little attempt to challenge the notion that all critical work is or should be uncanny. Introductions to the concept, such as those by Nicholas Royle and more recently Anna Masschelein, have tended to promote its ubiquity and irreducibility, even while acknowledging a dramatic shift in its fortunes since the 1990s. Opening with (...) a brief genealogy of uncanny theory in the late twentieth century (looking to work on Freud, the influence of Derrida and American deconstruction) the article pays particular attention to the watershed of the late 1980s when the uncanny is increasingly assimilated to the 'spectral' and begins to take shape as an autonomous theory. It probes the influence of Heidegger, who inflected Derrida's own turn to spectres, and the way the uncanny is mobilised on cultural and sociological terrain as a specifically ethical tool: a site of historical mourning or sociological resistance. The article proposes that the anti-conceptualism of the uncanny is a transcendant gesture which needs to be read in the context of a crisis in the theorisation of Marxism at the end of the 1980s. In all the clamour over the disturbing and in-coercible logic of the uncanny, there has been little analysis of its potentially reactionary function on the contemporary scene. (shrink)

The natural sciences seek to explain all natural phenomena, including human beings. This lofty objective encompasses the scientific project in all its glory, within which brain science constitutes an integral part. Essentially, however, neuroscientists not only seek to achieve a greater understanding of how the human brain works but rather, and perhaps mainly, aspire to understand human consciousness, that is, the subjective experience. According to this approach, consciousness is merely brain activity, and thus any progress in the study of the (...) brain represents an advance in the study of consciousness. Yet, despite the many and impressive neuroscientific achievements, when it comes to understanding human consciousness, this discipline cannot deliver the goods. This ongoing failure, so it will be suggested, arouses uncanny anxiety, largely because consciousness is the only phenomenon in which we have complete confidence. The present article suggests that in order to advance our understanding of the subjective experience, we must focus on how the body is thrown into the world in the here-and-now. (shrink)

This article provides an original exploration of the self-identified populist coalition leading the Italian government between 2018 and 2019. The analysis, informed by a governmentality approach, starts by scrutinising the economic, social, and cultural issues framed as political “problems” by the coalition, also highlighting the tensions underlying such constructions. The second step charts how this political subject sought to address those problems by deploying an array of political technologies. From examining these two dimensions, the article then can discern the (...) composite rationality—techno-sovereignism—that drove precariously the coalition’s art of government. Finally, the article sketches out some forms of contestation against the techno-sovereignist operations, whose significance may stretch beyond the Italian borders. Overall, although the Italian populist coalition turned out to be ephemeral, the dynamics that characterized its emergence and functioning could still be used heuristically to understand the interactions and reciprocal adjustments possibly used by right-wing and technocratic populist groups to exert political power conjointly. (shrink)

This study examines mainly two subjects: “Why do we accelerate?” and “How does acceleration become autopoietic?” The answers to these questions may be derived from technical, social, or psychological approaches. However, they provide only an incomplete picture if a perspective from the philosophy of technology is not considered alongside. In addition to offering different viewpoints on the essence of technology, technics, or technē, this study will focus on the notion of distance as a key to answering the above questions. (...) Conventionally, people usually understand that technology distances humans from nature. However, what does that mean? First of all, the idea of “nature” considered in this research refers to a distinction of non-nature/nature. A distinction implies a distance between both sides. Technology belongs to the side of non-nature, and creates a distance with the other side. The distance is getting enlarged when humans depend heavily on technology to reconnect humans to nature. In shortening or overcoming the distance, acceleration becomes autopoietic and leads to a paradox that can be unfolded only through accelerating more. In this study, technology is considered as a system functioning as simplification to create and to overcome alternately a distance with its environment, including nature. Through which technology not only acquires a tendency of acceleration, but also self-produces it. The development of writing tools from knots to tactile technology is investigated to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon of acceleration and its impact on humans and the world. In the end, it may be possible to think of a general theory of how acceleration becomes autopoietic. (shrink)

Robots equipped with artificial intelligence pose a huge challenge to traditional ontological differentiations between the spheres of the human and the non-human. Drawing mainly from neo-animistic and perspectivist approaches in anthropology and science and technology studies, the paper explores the potential of new forms of interconnectedness and rhizomatic entanglements between humans and a world transcending the boundaries between species and material spheres. We argue that intelligent robots meet virtually all criteria Western biology came up with to define ‘life’ and that (...) it ultimately makes sense to recognize them as a new species that is part of our social universe. Contrasting dualistic concepts of man and nature with a monistic approach, we show that traditional properties of life (agency, self-replication, etc.) may apply to artefacts and that, once we accept the idea that social relationships are ultimately open connections to matter of any kind, the seemingly strict boundaries between species and material spheres can no longer be sustained. Instead, we propose to include ‘matter’ and ideas into the sphere of the social as agents in their own right to form a _relational ontology of multi-species assemblages_ (ROMA). (shrink)

The paper seeks to address the lag between, on the one hand, existing ethical and socio-political frameworks and, on the other hand, developments in the realm of techno-science. I argue that the growing power of science and technology has been fed by, and has itself fed, the confrontation of instrumentalism and autonomy defining the modern condition. Conversely, the project of self-management of techno-science by citizens needs to proceed by binding ethical and democratic dimensions of the problem, as well (...) as the public and subjective elements of autonomous existence. Techno-science can only be ‘ethicalized’ if it is enframed in vibrant public spaces, at the same time as its democratization depends upon subjects’ sense of conscience and social responsibility. Key Words: autonomy • democracy • ethics • public sphere • technoscience. (shrink)

The popular image of Japanese society is a steroetypical one - that of a people characterised by a coherent set of thought and behaviour patterns, applying to all Japanese and transcending time. Ross Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto found this image quite incongruous during their research for this book in Japan. They ask whether this steroetype of the Japanese is not only generated by foreigners but by the Japanese themselves. This is likely to be a controversial book as it does not (...) contribute to the continuing mythologising of Japan and the Japanese. The book examines contemporary images of Japanese society by surveying an extensive sample of popular and academic literature on Japan. After tracing the development of "holistic" theories about the Japanese, commonly referred to as the "group model", attention is focused on the evaluation of that image. Empirical evidence contrary to this model is discussed and methodological lacunae are cited. A "sociology of Japanology" is also presented. In pursuit of other visions of Japanese society, the authors argue that certain aspects of Japanese behaviour can be explained by considering Japanese society as the exact inverse of the portayal provided by the group model. The authors also present a multi-dimensional model of social stratification, arguing that much of the variation in Japanese behaviour can be understood within the framework as having universal equivalence. (shrink)

_The Urban Uncanny_ explores through ten engaging essays the slippage or mismatch between our expectations of the city—as the organised and familiar environments in which citizens live, work, and go about their lives—and the often surprising and unsettling experiences it evokes. The city is uncanny when it reveals itself in new and unexpected light; when its streets, buildings, and people suddenly appear strange, out of place, and not quite right. Bringing together a variety of approaches, including psychoanalysis, historical and contemporary (...) case study of cities, urban geography, film and literary critique, the essays explore some of the unsettling mismatches between city and citizen in order to make sense of each, and to gauge the wellbeing of city life more generally. Essays examine a number of cities, including Edmonton, London, Paris, Oxford, Las Vegas, Berlin and New York, and address a range of issues, including those of memory, death, anxiety, alienation, and identity. Delving into the complex repercussions of contemporary mass urban development, _The Urban Uncanny_ opens up the pathological side of cities, both real and imaginary. This interdisciplinary collection provides unparalleled insights into the urban uncanny that will be of interest to academics and students of urban studies, urban geography, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, social studies and film studies, and to anyone interested in the darker side of city life. (shrink)

Recent work within the tradition of 4E cognitive science and philosophy of mind has drawn attention to the ways that our technological, material, and social environments can act as hostile, oppressive, and harmful scaffolding. These accounts push back against a perceived optimistic bias in the wider literature, whereby, according to the critics, our engagements with technology are painted as taking place on our terms, to our benefit, in ways uncomplicated by political realities. This article enters into that conversation, and (...) aims to highlight a specific form of threat from emerging technology: the threat of the ‘techno-wanton. ’ Drawing on classic work on personhood by Harry Frankfurt, I argue that emerging forms of adaptive technology threaten to degrade the depth and reflexivity of our economy of preferences. Techno-wantonness is a wanton-like state of diminished agency and personhood, whereby adaptive technology facilitates the wanton satisfaction of shallow preferences and the weakening of higher order volition. I argue that the concept of ‘mind invasion’, within the context of the hostile scaffolding literature has been applied too broadly, to the detriment of our analysis, and argue that the notion of ‘techno-wantonness’ should replace ‘mind invasion’ in regard to a specific class of case. In short, the new concept allows for a more subtle distinction between scaffolding impinging on an unwilling mind and technology that panders to the preferences of initially often very willing users. (shrink)

Socially Assistive Robots are increasingly conceived as applicable tools to be used in aged care. However, the use carries many negative and positive connotations. Negative connotations come forth out of romanticized views of care practices, disregarding their already established technological nature. Positive connotations are formulated out of techno-deterministic views on SAR use, presenting it as an inevitable and necessary next step in technological development to guarantee aged care. Ethical guidance of SAR use inspired by negative connotations tends to be (...) over-restrictive whereas positive connotations tend to provide over-permissive guidance. To avoid these extremes, we report on the development and content of 21 ethical orientations regarding SAR use in aged care. These orientations resulted from a multi-phased project, which consisted of empirical-ethical research focusing on older adults’ intuitions regarding SAR use and philosophical-ethical research focusing on philosophical-ethical argumentations regarding SAR use. This project led to the Socio-historical contextualization of the ethics of SAR use, in which the ethical impact of SAR use is localized on three interrelated analysis levels: societal, organizational, and individual-relational. The 21 novel orientations regarding SAR use are structured according to these levels and further categorized into foundational and applied orientations. The first category leads to critical reflection on SAR use while the latter category inspires decision-making processes regarding this use. While going beyond the care-romantic and techno-deterministic gaze of SAR use in aged care, the described orientations balance themselves between their over-restrictiveness and over-permissiveness. (shrink)

This paper identifies, explains, and illustrates the meaning of Post-Normal Techno-Anthropology as a two-step methodological strategy for analyzing policy-relevant scientific dissent in different segments of science, techno-science, and technological innovation. The first step focuses on epistemological and ethical analyses of the dissenting parties’ positions, and identifies conflicting arguments and assumptions on different levels. The second step involves scholarly discussions on how the analyses of policy-relevant scientific dissent can inform decision-makers and science advisors’ phronetic judgments. Dissenting views on climate (...) change of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change is used as an illustrative example. (shrink)

At first glance, "practical utopias" might appear to be a contradiction in terms. If, to be sure, most utopian proponents would love to see their schemes realized, painfully few offer the practical skills and detailed blueprints to come close to that goal or to obtain a sufficient following to achieve long-term successes, whether sustainable utopian communities or substantial political and economic transformations or even lasting takeaways from temporary world's fairs. Yet "practical utopias" can legitimately be applied to the "techno-fixes" (...) discussed here without contradiction."Techno-fixes" are avowedly practical. They are quick shortcuts to try to solve long-standing and deeply rooted economic, social... (shrink)

In one vision of human success, future human evolution lies in enhancing our bodies and especially our minds in order to achieve new levels of cooperation, morality, and well-being. In unadulterated form, this vision combines a pessimism in the human evolutionary heritage with an optimism in what technological enhancement can offer. This chapter points to a crucial blind spot: the role the social and cultural environment has played and continues to play in human evolution. In particular, the chapter emphasizes (...) how enhancement technologies are co-opted in the competition for social status. When this is taken into consideration, the vision of techno-libertarian success seems both less appealing and less plausible. Two desiderata for the concept of human success in the future are identified. (shrink)

Adolf Reinach and Gerda Walther were two figures of the early movement who gave phenomenological description to mystical and uncanny experiences; and, while the phenomenological approach each employs is slightly different, both commit to phenomenological description of the experiences of God and the uncanny, including the foreseeing of one’s death, in a manner that is open-minded and unprejudiced. In this chapter I will discuss the experiences of foreseeing and of God for both Reinach and Walther. I will rely on their (...) first-hand accounts of such experiences, utilizing the battlefield notes of Reinach from WWI found in his Sämtliche Werke and the mystical experience Walther describes having in 1918 in her book Zum Anderen Ufer. In the end it will become clear that phenomenology is an approach for all kinds of experiences, even those that are most unconventional, and thus the potential for further and fresh research is great. (shrink)

This paper extends Mori’s (IEEE Robot Autom Mag 19:98–100, 2012) uncanny valley-hypothesis to include technologies that fail its basic criterion that uncanniness arises when the subject experiences a discrepancy in a machine’s human likeness. In so doing, the paper considers Mori’s hypothesis about the uncanny valley as an instance of what Heidegger calls the ‘challenging revealing’ nature of modern technology. It introduces seeming autonomy and heteronomy as phenomenological categories that ground human being-in-the-world including our experience of things and people. It (...) is suggested that this categorical distinction is more foundational than Heidegger’s existential structures and phenomenological categories. Having introduced this novel phenomenological distinction, the paper considers the limits of Mori’s hypothesis by drawing on an example from science fiction that showcases that uncanniness need not only be caused by machines that resemble human beings. In so doing, it explores how the seeming autonomy-heteronomy distinction clarifies (at least some of) the uncanniness that can arise when humans encounter advanced technology which is irreducible to the anthropocentrism that shapes Mori’s original hypothesis. (shrink)

The critique of metaphysics can often entail a critique of liberalism. Rorty sought a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophy and the broader humanities, by linking the rejection of metaphysics to a justification for liberal democracy and reformism. He believed that the recognition of socio-historical contingency concerning interpretations of fundamental values and of truth, combined with a humanities education, would create a sense of solidarity that would motivate reforms. Freire argues that a dialogic form of education is as important as the (...) humanities’ content. For Freire, people liberated by a critical education based on dialogue rather than a passive reception of information, can develop a radical critique of capitalism. Vattimo argues that while Heidegger saw techno-science as being the final phase in metaphysical domination, the contemporary development of information and communications technology creates a ‘Babel-like’ pluralism that undermines the ‘violence’ of metaphysic’s totalising thought. This can allow for the development of a post-metaphysical ‘weak communism’ that improves social justice. Rorty and Freire help to show that it is education, rather than technological developments, that can motivate a post-metaphysical politics of solidarity, and Vattimo and Freire are correct to argue that replacing reformism with radical critique is needed for social justice, although Vattimo’s weak communism only provides limited social justice. (shrink)

According to a chorus of authors, the human life-world is currently invaded by an avalanche of high-tech devices referred to as “emerging,” ”intimate,” or ”NBIC” technologies: a new type of contrivances or gadgets designed to optimize cognitive or sensory performance and / or to enable mood management. Rather than manipulating objects in the outside world, they are designed to influence human bodies and brains more directly, and on a molecular scale. In this paper, these devices will be framed as ‘extimate’ (...) technologies (both intimate and external; both embedded and foreign; both life-enhancing and intrusive), a concept borrowed from Jacques Lacan. Although Lacan is not commonly regarded as a philosopher of technology, the dialectical relationship between human desire and technological artefacts runs as an important thread through his work. Moreover, he was remarkably prescient concerning the blending of life science and computer science, which is such a distinctive feature of the current techno-scientific turn. Building on a series of Lacanian concepts, my aim is to develop a psychoanalytical diagnostic of the technological present. Finally, I will indicate how such an analysis may inform our understanding of human life and embodiment as such. (shrink)

Computers are supposed to be smart, yet they frustrate both ordinary users and computer technologists. Why are people frustrated by smart machines? Computers don’t fit people. People think in terms of comparisons, stories, and analogies, and seek feedback, whereas computers are based on a fundamental design that does not fit with analogical and feedback thinking. They impose a binary, an all-or-nothing, approach to everything. Moreover, the social world and institutions that have developed around computer technology hide and reinforce the (...) lack of alignment between computers and people. This book suggests a solution: we do not have to accept the way things are now and work around the bad social and technical design of computers. Rather, it proposes a diverse, distributed, critical discussion of how to design and build both computer technology and its social institutions. (shrink)

Human organizations’ adoption of the paradigm of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is associated with the growth of techno-empowerment, which is the process of transferring autonomy in decision-making to intelligent machines. Particular persuasive strategies have been identified that may coax people to use intelligent devices. However, there is a substantial research gap regarding what antecedents influence human intention to assign decision-making autonomy to artificial agents. In this study, ethological and evolutionary concepts are applied to explain the drivers for autonomous assistants’ (...) techno-empowerment. The method used in the study was a 4 × 2 between-subject experiment made with 278 persons. The research tool used to collect the data was an online survey. The results show that more positive attitudes and higher trust, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use are correlated with higher intention to allow the autonomous assistant independence in decision-making. Second, the results suggest that the more human-like a non-human agent is, the higher the intention to empower it—but only if this agent simultaneously provides functional and visual anthropomorphic cues explainable by the mimicry effect. (shrink)

Are the robots coming? Is the singularity near? Will we be dominated by technology? The usual response to ethical issues raised by pervasive and ubiquitous technologies assumes a philosophical anthropology centered on existential autonomy and agency, a dualistic ontology separating humans from technology and the natural from the artificial, and a post-monotheistic dualist and creational spirituality. This paper explores an alternative, less modern vision of the “technological” future based on different assumptions: a “deep relational” view of human being and self, (...) an ecological view of human–technology relations, and “ubiquitous” spirituality. Moving beyond an ethics of fear and control, it is argued that technology is part of a lived and active whole that is at the same time human, technological, social, and spiritual. Influenced by ecological and Eastern thinking, it is concluded that an ethics of technology understood as a relational ethics of life asks us to adapt and grow within this multi-faced ecology, which is currently—but not necessarily—pervaded by hyper-individualist modernity and its ego-boosting technologies of the self. This growth is only possible by relating to, and learning from, other cultures and from their specific way of pervading and being pervaded. (shrink)

With the widespread infusion of online technology there has been an increase in various studies investigating the practices in online communities including also philosophical perspectives. What those debates have in common is that they call for more critical thinking about the theory of online communication. Drawing on Techno-Anthropological research perspectives, our interest is placed on exploring and identifying human interactions and technology in intersectional spaces. This article explores information systems that allow for interchanges of different users. We discuss ontological (...) assumptions that focus on understanding the kind of dialogue that can be captured between different expert groups when they utilize information systems. We present the notion of ‘dialogic’ by Mikhail Bakhtin and contextualize it through an analysis of online dialogue. Dialogic or ‘conversation and inquiry’ is discussed as being mediated through human relationships. Acknowledging the existence of at least two voices the underlying differences between dialogue partners are highlighted. (shrink)