Speculating with glitches: Keeping the future moving

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"File:Kaposváron betiltották a Kétfarkú Kutya Párt járdafestéseit.jpeg" by Földes András, Index.hu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
“File:Kaposváron betiltották a Kétfarkú Kutya Párt járdafestéseit.jpeg” by Földes András, Index.hu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Shawn Bodden PhD Researcher at Edinburgh University (shawn.bodden@fulbrightmail.org) and Jen Ross is Senior Lecturer in Digital Education and Centre co-director (Digital Cultures) at Edinburgh University (jen.ross@ed.ac.uk)

This blog post relates to the Global Discourse article Shawn Bodden & Jen Ross: Speculating with glitches: keeping the future

It’s been a year of glitches, large and small. The glitch has become inescapable in the wake of the worldwide disruptions, failures and uncertainties caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the faltering, inadequate responses of too many world leaders to its challenge in their pre-emptive drive to return to a ‘new normal’. But what is a glitch, and should we understand it as more than an error (technical or otherwise)?

Glitches are a kind of encounter, where expectations, preferences and plans are disrupted, but which thereby provoke new, previously unthought possible futures. By responding to and using glitches, we engage in future-making practices that negotiate what feels possible here-and-now. Irksome glitchy moments can lead us—grudgingly at times—to improvise creative alternatives to our original plans. Rather than seeing the resolution of a glitch as a return to a pre-existing, smooth-functioning way of doing things, speculative decision-making and experimentation involves achieving something following the uncertain situation of a glitch. Repair thus becomes a situated and practical act of reflection on how to work with a glitch: a ‘new’ normal accompanied by lessons-learned, scars, corrosion, raised insurance rates and other unexpected changes. The glitch becomes a space for practical and critical speculative thought about here-and-now possible worlds.

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We Need to Talk about Liberty

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David Tyfield is Professor of Sustainable Transitions and Political Economy at Lancaster University (d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk)

This blog post relates to the Global Discourse article David Tyfield: Interview: Governing Complexity and Reconceptualising Liberty

Living in a world beset by so many new and uncontrollable challenges, there is small wonder that there has been a resurgence of interest in questions of justice.  Justice clearly matters profoundly, but there is another social virtue that is arguably just as important, and as both the necessary condition for the ‘good life’ and as an end-in-itself, namely liberty. 

Yet today ‘liberty’ is not only rather neglected but often actively repudiated. The reason for this allergic aversion to liberty is obvious. For the term occupies a central position in the political project many of those concerned about justice today aim precisely to dismantle. The US-centric project of neoliberalism underpins the whole gamut of overflowing complex system problems that now threaten to overwhelm us, including both ecological destruction and socioeconomic inequality. 

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Domestic Drone Futures: Investments and Imaginations

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Drone https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/219049ea-c7fe-48cb-9b43-4ab9f9579f5a
Drone camera (Creative commons)

Dr Maximilian Jablonowski (jablonowski@isek.uzh.ch) is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich; Dr Anna Jackman (Anna.Jackman@rhul.ac.uk) is a Lecturer in Political Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This blog post relates to the Global Discourse article Anna Jackman and Maximilian Jablonowski: Investment in the imaginary

Setting the scene

On the evening of 1 December 2013, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos presented on CBS a video advert for the company’s new project; named Prime Air, the venture promised the shipment of goods to customers via drones within thirty minutes. This announcement was likely the first discursive event of commercial drone use. While initially exposed to ridicule, Amazon’s plan went on to change how commercial drones, and in fact drones more widely, are publicly imagined. Since then, drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, have been increasingly re-imagined and re-spatialised from battlefield origins to their growing embrace as domestic actors transforming urban skies. If we are, as it is asserted, entering into a ‘drone age’ or ‘zeitgeist’, the aerial delivery drone is a key facet of this evolving drone imagination.

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Concretise, situate, democratise: The Museum of Carbon Ruins

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Artificial grass
Grass

Paul Graham Raven is a postdoctoral researcher for Lund University, Sweden (paul@paulgrahamraven.com)

This blog relates to the Global Discourse article Paul G. Raven and Johannes Stripple: Touring the carbon ruins: towards an ethics of speculative decarbonisation

The Museum of Carbon Ruins is… well, we’re still not sure how to categorise it, in truth. Is it an art intervention? An immersive research exhibit on decarbonisation? Climate change theatre? It’s all of these things, in a way – the common thread being the creation of a space of speculation about climate change, and how we might adapt to it.

More prosaically, the Museum of Carbon Ruins (MCR) is a set of vitrines (or an antique suitcase, depending on the venue) full of familiar objects and images, which are reframed for the museum’s ‘visitors’ by researchers performing the role of curators or guides to the museum itself, which purports to ‘exist’ in 2050 or thereabouts.

If you’re wondering what the point is, you’re not the first! However, we flatter ourselves that most of the museum’s ‘visitors’ have grasped it, even if they haven’t taken away exactly the same point as one another. It’s in the nature of the thing that describing it can’t come close to reproducing it – and I might go so far as to say that’s the point. But what of speculative methods in general? Why are we academics messing around with the tools of science fiction, product design and participatory theatre? I have three answers, or three aspects of a single answer: the creation of speculative climate futures can serve to concretise the challenge, situate the consequences and democratise the discussion.

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From Anthropocene to Chthulucene – Staying with Speculation: Natures, Futures, Politics

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Portrait of Greta Thunberg

Dr Christine Mortimer is an International Teaching Fellow in Management and Organisational Behaviour, Lancaster University (c.mortimer1@lancaster.ac.uk) and Dr Malé Lujan Escalante is Lecturer in the Centre for Innovation, University of Bristol (male.lujane@bristol.ac.uk)

This blog post relates to the Global Discourse article Luke Moffat, Christine J. Mortimer & Maria Luhan Escalante: Introduction

‘We-all of us on Terra-live in disturbing times, mixed up times, troubling and turbid times’. ‘Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places’ (Haraway, Staying with Trouble).

Donna Haraway in her book, ‘Staying with Trouble’ (2016), articulates the future that we are now living in, every single one of us. Since December 2019, when the world first heard, from Wuhan in China, the news of a new pneumonia like virus, 2020 became the year that we all have been encouraged to believe that as a species we are in a global war against an unseen enemy. Through the pandemic the idea of ‘a battle with nature’ has been consistently voiced in the media, ‘Army prepares for battle against invisible enemy as Nightingale Hospital set to open.  The closing of national borders globally, echoes the events from World War 1 and 2. The news headlines for ‘frontline’ deaths are now over 2 million people. However, this does not consider the exponential numbers of people that Covid-19 has personally affected.

Within the introduction to Staying with Speculation: Natures, Futures, Politics are these words, ‘The questions of what speculation is, what it means, and what it is for, touch and trouble the pieces of work in this issue. As nature begins to “speak back” at our various misdemeanours, exploitations, and violence’s, the urgency of tackling the messy, unpredictable, volatile and multiple materials of possible futures is thrown into stark relief’. And, here we are in a place and space where nature has spoken back urgently to the ‘human-centred’ view of our relationships with this beautifully diverse ‘worlds within world’ that we inhabit, in the form of the current pandemic, which has been with us over the curation of this special edition.

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