Featured Post | No. 16: April 22-28
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On things
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- 02.May
- No. 17: Packing warmth
Gun marketing is essentially selling women a compact and hyper-protective boyfriend.They’re not packing heat; they’re packing safety, confidence, companionship, comfort. Warmth.
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- 23.Apr
- No. 13: The piglet and commodity fetishism
Commodity fetishism has nothing to do with your creepy uncle and his shoe collection. But it has everything to do with my guinea pig travel wallet.
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- 16.Apr
- No. 9: Parts is parts?
Of fundamental importance to the ethics of the social life of things is the question of how we decide what is a thing and what isn’t, and what a thing’s primary function is, and what the implications of those decisions might be.
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On other people's stuff
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- 22.Jul
- No. 18: Complex systems in your mouth
Any conceivable thing is already part of any number of physical and social systems. But that can be difficult to wrap one’s head around, and it’s helpful when starting out to look at one that’s been wrangled over by thousands of people over thousands of years. And then you can eat it.
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- 25.Apr
- No. 14: 1 of Amerikaz most wanted, twice
The interesting thing about the Holo-Pac and the subsequent e-frenzy is that it is absolutely both commodity fetishism and fetish for a commodity. Two of anthropolo-g’s most wanted.
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- 18.Apr
- No. 10: Googly eyes
I don’t believe that Google’s attempt to put us ‘back in the moment’ is even faintly Orwellian. I wish it were. Orwell was challenging and interesting and made us think about a lot of things. Project Glass just seems to make life more tedious.
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Thingopticon
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- 27.Apr
- No. 15: Of fetishism and form
Anthropomorphism is not the same thing as fetishism, but it’s has been put to pretty heavy use in the design and marketing of commodities of all sorts and lends them a certain degree of independence and power they would not otherwise have.
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- 20.Apr
- No. 11: Of parts and perspective
Wherever you come down on the question of body parts as objects, there’s no denying that they’re the basis for some beautiful things, and that even the most determinedly scientific presentations are creative works of vision.
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- 13.Apr
- No. 7: Of forms of tribute
Materials are often obstinate– they can’t be made to do or mean precisely what we’d like, which makes it even more difficult to make human qualities manifest in stone, sound, chitin, or whatever.
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The week in material
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- 30.Apr
- No. 16: April 22-28
cartoon skeletons, salvaged soccer balls, more upsetting pizza,1000 words, dogs and hurdles, librarian-flavoured coffee, the CAT-AT
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- 23.Apr
- No. 12: April 15-21
The Titantic, Tupac, shipping news, stupid & dangerous, dogs on tires, books on mules, hair on mice.
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- 14.Apr
- No. 8: April 8-14
Brains!, complex systems, dogs on signs, e-books, the motion of the ocean, dogs in pizza, yee-haw!
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