ABSTRACT
Today we are witnessing a fundamental change in our relationship to technology, one whose full implications remain unclear. From the invention of metallurgy to the beginnings of the digital revolution, technology aimed primarily at transforming the material world in accordance with human needs and desires. Digital technologies, on the other hand, have led to an unprecedented intrusion of technology into how humans communicate with each other, exchange and process information and navigate their world; the insertion of a layer of technological mediation and algorithmic processing between us as individuals, other people and our physical surroundings. Digital technologies colonise precisely those spaces from which rationalised work and administration had previously been, to some degree at least, excluded: domestic space, family relations, friendship and affinity groups. We find ourselves dependent for our basic functioning on digital platforms and systems, subjected to their logic and integrated into what increasingly looks like a 21st-century version of what Lewis Mumford called the ‘megamachine’. The contributors to this volume draw on a variety of concepts developed by anthropologists in their fieldwork, including the trickster, imitation, gift exchange, participation and above all liminality, to interrogate the contemporary technological revolution. These provide a means of thinking outside the case-hardened framework of modern concepts, with their inbuilt assumptions of universalism, progress, subject–object dualism and methodological individualism among others, to interrogate the logics of digitalisation and the contemporary technologisation of the social.
