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Without Innovation: African American Lifeworlds and the Internet of Things

  • about this site
  • But really, what is the internet of things?
This is the second talk in a series. (The first was a TEDx talk given at Amherst College in 2013). Each talk is a speculation on a set of questions about technology, embodiment, and temporality. How can we build a future when we have already had a past? How might we account for how unremembered pasts impact the good work we desire for the future? How do we think about future in a time when futures arrive more and more quickly? What happens to metaphor? To history? [more]

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angela davis Angela Y. Davis apple watch artificial intelligence Bina48 black cyborgs Claudia Rankine cybernetics Ferguson Frederick Douglass Fred Moten graphical interface hardware IFTTT internet of Things IoT Janelle Brown John Markoff Joy James João Costa Vargas Judith Butler Kevin Warick Kittler Louis Althusser Michael Brown MITH Moya Bailey poetry Saidiya Hartman software solidarity subjectivity talented tenth Trayvon Martin welcome

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Abstract

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“We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit.” — James Baldwin

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  • cane milling machine

humans made machines; machines make machines

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“Firstly, on an intentionally superficial level, perfect graphic user interfaces, since they dispense with writing itself, hide a whole machine from its users…”

I also wanted to put a little bit of pressure on the sense of who has power, who can stand in that “I” versus who can’t, and, talking specifically about African-Americans, on the notion that we started as property. The notion that personhood came after objecthood, that the move into the “I” was actually—insanely—a step that had to be taken legally.

— Claudia Rankine