…the global media was in the process of invading humanity’s very bones and sinews. Soon, even the denizens of the world’s most remote forests would be striding like stiff-necked London…

…Database of Dreams are like this. They are, in the phrase of Michael Taussig’s that Lemov quotes, “fragments that are suggestive of a world beyond, a world that does not…

Introducing the PRT The Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) pods of Masdar City were first exhibited at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi in January 2009, giving the visitors…

…economics of the Mediterranean world and began to examine, in his usual detail, the politics and administrative practices of the Jewish institutions of Fustat and their relations with the Islamic…

…production of news and, in the process, gaining influence over how traditional news stories and genres are constructed and circulated” (Russell, 2016: 7). This process was also helped by the…

…outside the industry. Take, for instance, Rule 12 of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, which urges readers to steer clear of the center store: Rule #12: Shop the peripheries of the…

…our lives are being tracked, monitored, and stored for future use, and by “us” here I include vast swathes of the nonhuman as well as human world. We leave traces…

…to the turtle-deformed-by-a-plastic-ring, iconic pictures recognized by growing numbers of people around the world today connect improper disposal of plastic litter with a growing threat for wildlife. In a way,…

The Shelter On January 26, 2017, the IKEA refugee shelter was declared the worldwide Design of the Year in a unanimous decision.[1] When I interviewed one of the jurors about…

Mumbai’s public water network has long distributed water, difference, and inequality in the city. The city’s hydraulic infrastructure, incrementally extended in the last 150 years, is today the sixth largest…

…business or individuals and distributed in decentralized grids. These dreams for an alternative energy future and a renewable democracy influenced the politics of the German energy transition often regarded as…

…to numerous rich, though unruly, collections of language data. Many of these, the Boas Collection not least of all, are undergoing rapid digitization today. World War II put the brakes…

…recognize that wind can only operate as an infrastructure by composing many publics, by pulling persons into its spheres of politics and potential (Sloterdijk 2014). The raw form of aeolis…

…race for novelty in world of information technology should be a clear occasion for pause in the world of thought; and so it is here… Christopher M. Kelty March 2012…

…we are offered an alternative: gross national happiness. Massive surveys like the Gallup World Poll offer global maps of affect and desire (Figure 1), and governments seek interventions that provide…

…feature of online infrastructure, suggesting books, movies, music, and news to users. They draw correspondences between users and items by comparing user ratings, producing recommendations with the familiar form: “Users…

…population, overcrowded cities, human intrusions into previously uninhabited areas, civil wars leading to crowded refugee camps, and commercial travel that could rapidly spread diseases around the world. Today, more than…

…to share cat pictures, memes, porn, music, and news as well as an unprecedented platform for intellectual liberation, organization, and mobilization. Pretty great, right? However, to quote Kevin Kelly: There…

…reflected in the statistic that more people in the world today have access to a mobile phone than a safe and clean toilet (United Nations 2013). As such, the toilet…

…Many of the world’s biggest food companies have employed teams of LCA experts to “footprint” their products (the word has become a verb). They are quantifying farm-to-fork impacts not just…

…in late 2014, I heard an emergent class of panoptic Modi joke in which an official skipping office duty, breaking a rule, or not following the PM’s instructions would suddenly…

…both the structural consolidation of entertainment and news media, and the practical intermixing of fact and fiction in newspapers, TV, film, and especially the nascent World Wide Web. According to…

…defined as generating new ideas leading to large-scale solutions, as crucial to increase the impact of their interventions. In the words of Judith Rodin, former long-time president of the Rockefeller…

…all, there is no sense today that the UK’s public infrastructure should necessarily be publicly owned or directly controlled by the state. On the contrary, the National Infrastructure Delivery Plan…

…governments to the historical experiences of rural displacement associated with supplying water for the canal (Carse 2014). The rod revealed a regional hydropolitics. Since 1906, when the U.S. government decided…

…explores this entanglement, and asks: what are the politics of disclosing vulnerabilities? What new risks and changed expectations exist in a world where it is not clear who is hacking…

…Michael Taussig recently observed, “The drawings come across as fragments that are suggestive of a world beyond, a world that does not have to be explicitly recorded and is in…

…of May ‘68. As it spread through the social sciences around 1970, it was considered “leftist” just as econometric techniques, one the other hand, were thought of as “rightist.” Today…