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All posts for the month May, 2018

Nonhuman and Nonbiological Phenomenology

Posted by Damien P. Williams on May 15, 2018
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Late last month, I was at Theorizing the Web, in NYC, to moderate Panel B3, “Bot Phenomenology,” in which I was very grateful to moderate a panel of people I was very lucky to be able to bring together. Johnathan Flowers, Emma Stamm, and Robin Zebrowski were my interlocutors in a discussion about the potential nature of nonbiological phenomenology. Machine consciousness. What robots might feel.

I led them through with questions like “What do you take phenomenology to mean?” and “what do you think of the possibility of a machine having a phenomenology of its own?” We discussed different definitions of “language” and “communication” and “body,” and unfortunately didn’t have a conversation about how certain definitions of those terms mean that what would be considered language between cats would be a cat communicating via signalling to humans.

It was a really great conversation and the Live Stream video for this is here, and linked below (for now, but it may go away at some point, to be replaced by a static youtube link; when I know that that’s happened, I will update links and embeds, here).

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My Review of Shannon Vallor’s TECHNOLOGY AND THE VIRTUES

Posted by Damien P. Williams on May 10, 2018
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My piece “Cultivating Technomoral Interrelations,” a review of Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting has been up over at the Social Epistemology Research and Reply Collective for a few months, now, so I figured I should post something about it, here.

As you’ll read, I was extremely taken with Vallor’s book, and think it is a part of some very important work being done. From the piece:

Additionally, her crucial point seems to be that through intentional cultivation of the self and our society, or that through our personally grappling with these tasks, we can move the world, a stance which leaves out, for instance, notions of potential socioeconomic or political resistance to these moves. There are those with a vested interest in not having a more mindful and intentional technomoral ethos, because that would undercut how they make their money. However, it may be that this is Vallor’s intent.

The audience and goal for this book seems to be ethicists who will be persuaded to become philosophers of technology, who will then take up this book’s understandings and go speak to policy makers and entrepreneurs, who will then make changes in how they deal with the public. If this is the case, then there will already be a shared conceptual background between Vallor and many of the other scholars whom she intends to make help her to do the hard work of changing how people think about their values. But those philosophers will need a great deal more power, oversight authority, and influence to effectively advocate for and implement what Vallor suggests, here, and we’ll need sociopolitical mechanisms for making those valuative changes, as well.

[Image of the front cover of Shannon Vallor’s TECHNOLOGY AND THE VIRTUES. Circuit pathways in the shapes of trees.]

This is, as I said, one part of a larger, crucial project of bringing philosophy, the humanities, and social sciences into wide public conversation with technoscientific fields and developers. While there have always been others doing this work, it is increasingly the case that these folks are being both heeded and given institutional power and oversight authority.

As we continue the work of building these systems, and in the wake of all these recent events, more and more like this will be necessary.

Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting is out in paperback, June 1st, 2018. Read the rest of “Cultivating Technomoral Interrelations: A Review of Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues” at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.

My Thoughts on “This Is America”

Posted by Damien P. Williams on May 9, 2018
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Others have already examined the dances, the layering of images, so  much else, but wanted to try to… evoke something of what I felt, watching this.

The absolute bare minimum simplest way to interpret this working is as an attempt to force a reckoning with the fact of and our complicity within the commodification of life, death, and culture, generally, and most specifically the commodification of Black lives, deaths, cultures.

Donald Glover’s newest song and video (song and dances, singing and dancing, schuckin’ and jivin’) constitute a celebration and a condemnation. It is about and IS complicity in the system which demands that Black people sing and dance or die—as in either be killed for not singing and dancing the way those with power want you to, or just, y’know, die for all they care (though if we kill each other who cares [“Go Away”]), but we’d better not resist (in any way they can understand, and even then our time on the stage in the spotlight had better be brief and cultivated for their pleasure), and we’d better not show anything real—unless it has a beat and you can dance to it.

I say again, it is a condemnation of this, and is about this, but it also is this. Because it has to be? Because the only time this country is Happy to listen to the voices of Black people is when they’re porgy-and-bess-in’ it…but also because Glover knows that’s what it takes to sell his art, tell his stories, to stay alive long enough to do so. (“Get your money, Black man.”)

But when you’re the product of 500 years of kidnapping and genocide, shouldn’t you get/don’t you need/want to breathe and laugh and dance, in spite of—because of—everything… and to keep it from happening to you?

This song and this video is about all of that. (And all the guilt and weight and weariness that all of that implies.)

I want this placed in conversation with both Beyoncé’s “Formation” working, and the series version of DEAR WHITE PEOPLE. Maybe in a classroom, or a podcast, or a panel discussion at a conference. I want scholars of color to undertake an exegesis of fame and incantations of power and safety in PoC-made pop media, and I want it in any way, shape, or form that it can be made to happen.