I found out about this place by following a link from an io9 post to a website called Float Finder, which puts people in touch with their local sensory deprivation center and also seems to be a hub for a whole tank-subculture. The io9 piece is really worth a read too, especially the bit on sensory deprivation pioneer John C. Lilly, a man who took intramuscular LSD until he discovered he could speak to dolphins.

Or as io9 puts it–

Calling John C. Lilly eccentric would be akin to calling the Beatles a popular band – somehow “eccentric” just doesn’t do the man justice.

Perhaps it was the mystique of Lilly that inspired Altered States (1980), something of a cult flick among anthropologists, which stars William Hurt eating muscimol and floating in a tank until he manages to somehow de-evolve into a rampaging hominid. Personally I find the movie a bit of a dud (its been 12 years since I first saw it and haven’t really been tempted to revisit it) and I’m a fan of creature features and so-bad-its-good flicks.

The movie is best remembered for its funky, toxic freakouts:

Ok, so, you just saw the best part. But if you want to put it in your Netflix queue, you’ll be in good company among the consciousness studies crowd. Your enjoyment of the film may or may not be improved by being in an actual altered state.

I arrived at Float First early to watch an instructional video which emphasized safety, comfort, and not touching your eyes. “The only thing that can ruin a float is getting salt water in your eyes,” the attendant told me. While I sat through the orientation an older woman arrived for her second float and proceeded directly to her session. I, on the other hand, got the full tour. The attendant showed me the I-sopod and shower. I used the bathroom and rinsed off before climbing into the pod.

Because I had read the business’ website ahead of time I intentionally consumed less coffee than usual, but I did ingest 60mg of pseudoephedrine for my sinus congestion. I was not high, people. Just saying.

The room was a bit chilly when I stepped out of the shower. I climbed into the pod, which was lit with gentle colored lights and closed the bay door shut that was hinged like a hatchback trunk. Inside the water was warm and inviting, maybe less than a foot deep. Soon the air became moist and heavy. I pushed the button to kill the lights and began to experiment with getting comfortable.

Some soft New Age music played as I sloshed around. The density of the water was so high it was pushing my shoulders up while my head was tilting back and I found it slightly uncomfortable to keep my arms at my side. The attendant had recommended keeping one’s arms above the head. Eventually I found it worked best to support my head by lacing my fingers together and resting that way.

I thought back to the advice the attendant gave me, “Try not to let your thoughts race. Don’t think: ‘How long have I been in here? When will the cool stuff start?’ The best thing to do for your first floating experience is just try and take a little nap.”

I stretched out. In the darkness and silence I could hear my muscles move. A full body stretch sent my heart racing, a pleasant sensation. In the distance I could sense vibrations. Perhaps these distant sounds came from the pod’s plumbing or maybe from the restaurant next door but I don’t think I hallucinated them. In fact I don’t think I had any auditory hallucinations at all. I have, in the past, have purely auditory dreams with no visual component so I wondered if that would manifest itself somehow in the tank, but not this time.

Once the lights were out it didn’t stay dark for long. Specks of visual apparitions were present almost immediately. It wasn’t until later that they became really bright. I spent most of the time floating with my eyes open, but I tried closing them too. In general the visuals were more intense with my eyes open though it was pitch black either way.

One difficulty in my experience was in keeping still. Any gentle movement could disturb the float as the body slowly, softly touched into the side of the pod where it was bounced back and forth like a pin ball in slow motion. The more calm the body became the more calm the mind. I think the sensation of the mind leaving the body probably works best if you’re motionless, but I became fidgety and curious about exploring my surroundings. In addition to stretching my limbs I tried sitting up a few times too.

At their most intense the visual effects were quite remarkable. My mental state was a bit like being caught in that threshold right before you fall asleep, but somehow lucid. Quieting the mind was the primary benefit I was looking to gain but I found it was not easy to do. At first I found myself thinking about work, about my mother’s death, about family problems concerning the foster family of my adopted daughter’s siblings. By concentrating on my breathing (one of the only things you can hear inside the pod) I was able to calm my mind with limited success. It was in this state of calm that I experienced the most pronounced visual hallucinations.

There was one hallucination in particular that, like an old friend, I’ve known since childhood. Every now and then I experience it still just as I’m falling asleep. It’s a bright slowly moving flash of white light. If you can, picture the rotating lantern at the top of a lighthouse. From a stable vantage point it would seem dim as the lamp was turned away from you then slowly sweeping across your field of vision becoming brightest as it shown directly at you before diminishing when he lamp rotated away.

My old friend the lighthouse was particularly well defined in the tank, usually moving from right to left across my field of non-vision. The light blobs had an amoeba-like shape, getting thick and then thin as it moved or growing tails like fish. They were yellowish to white, but not blindingly bright (those are especially unwelcome while falling asleep as they startle me awake). Accompanying this was a crackling lightning, a sort of shimmering Northern Lights in electric purple. This hallucination moved much faster and its shape more vascular. Typically these two hallucinations coincided although they didn’t seem to have anything to do with one another – meaning they didn’t interact or interfere with each other.

The really intense light shows were relatively brief and seemed to coincide with letting my mind go, concentrating on breathing, and not trying to force myself to see things.

Something special was happening with my sense of touch and awareness of body. The water is heated to the temperature of your skin and the air inside the pod quickly comes to match it. With the high density of the water countering the effects of gravity and it being total darkness one does not have a sense of the body as being discretely bound in the ordinary sense. Over time you stop feeling the water and only have the sensation of being suspended – floating like a grape stuck in a Jello mold. Sometimes this would bring about a sensation like falling or flying. I found I could trigger this with a stretch prompting my heart give a little race as I squeezed the blood in my muscles. In that rush there was a feeling like coming down for a landing.

The sensation of flying, the visuals, and the mental state of calm weren’t all neatly packaged. It took a little effort, but one gets the feeling that with practice you could get better at it.

After an extended period of time of not being able to orient my body I found I could convince myself that I was standing up rather than lying prone. Then, as an experiment, I tried to convince myself that I was standing on my head. This was somewhat harder to do. In a third experiment I tried to image that I was actually floating face down instead of face up, but couldn’t quite pull it off. Around this time my arms began to feel very heavy and moving them took real effort. It was a bit like Han Solo must have felt trapped in carbonite, as I pushed against what seemed to be a solid surface but was only air.

Well into the session now, my thoughts began to change too. I was tumbling through memories from the recent past going backwards. I thought of my life here in Virginia, my wife and how fetching she was in college. I saw others of my friends from college and the places we would go. I saw my high school and people I knew then. I remembered family vacations as a little boy and thought of my mother.

With my hands I touched my belly and legs. The Epsom salts had made my skin soft and pleasantly slimey. I brought a finger to my mouth and the salt tasted terrible, it made me spit. My muscles loosened and I could hear my stomach gurgle to itself. A knot in my back unkinked itself and my spine gave a crack like a knuckle.

In the distance the New Age-y music crept back in. This was my cue that an hour had passed and the session was over, but I didn’t want to leave. I waited a minute longer and the music gently made itself more present (you never know, I might have hallucinated it so I wanted to be sure). I made my way over to the light switch and the dim purple light was like a bold sunrise. I squinted. It was time to wake up, it was day even if my pupils still thought it was night. I pushed open the pod bay door and cold air rushed in. I scampered wet feet to the shower and turned on the hot water and steam. The salt sloughed off; my cell phone rang. It was time to go back to “reality”.

I dressed and prepared to leave. The attendant at the front desk offered me a bottle of water and spoke to me briefly about the experience. I told him about the difficulty I had in fidgeting and quieting the mind, which he assured me were typical of first time users. He quickly excused himself to ready the room for the next customer.

The drive home was truly pleasant and then I enjoyed a short walk around my neighborhood, stopping for tea at a friend’s house. I felt so mellow and peaceful, like having just stepped out of a hot tub after receiving a full body massage and waking from a satisfying nap all combined. Colors seemed brighter and the real world a little more magical.

The floating experience was worthwhile. I can definitely see how like massage or acupuncture the effects of floating would be cumulative. It was a treasure to have such a peaceful respite from what had been a stressful week. Highly recommended.

Some of my most retweeted posts are links to articles and books that I like. I tweet about them because I see Twitter, like a lot of the Internet, as a place to discover new scholarly material which has been vetted and filtered by people whose taste I trust. Why, for instance, should I page through old tables of contents of Leonarda when I can just get a recommendation directly from Jenny Cool? In particular, I tweet as a way to remind myself (who I follow and archive) of articles from newly published journals that I would be interested in reading. Of course, I’m also interested in letting my friends know what I am reading, building scholarly community, and so forth.

If you increased volume a lot — but not to the level of some gossip twitterers — and adopted a more cynical attitude to posting it would be relatively easy to become a definitive maker of public opinion just by sustained gumption. All of the key features of academic faddism are accentuated by Twitter: the focus on speed, the ability to dredge up and lionize obscure sources and, best of all, a media cycle so short that people tweet articles rather than actually read them. In a world of no competition, cynically tweeting the newest latest slowly starts creating a definitive voice in the public sphere — indeed, the public sphere itself — just because there is no one else. In a world of heavy competition other factors would lead to dominance, including outlasting other tweeters, ‘platform’ (already being famous), and of course the quality of your ability to filter content down to the choice nuggets.

After a while I think it would be possible to start streaming tweets about new and hip content based purely on reading tables of contents rather than the articles themselves — since after all no one is reading the whole articles anyway. The result would be something like that Stanislaw Lem short story where the the guy dresses up as a robot to investigate the world of evil robots only to find out that it is populated entirely by people dressed up as robots trying to hide that fact from each other: one would have the constant sense that there was a consensus about what was new and important that everyone else was reading or invested in. If this was the mining industry — where accurate fast news and analysis sell at a premium — we could pursue a ‘premium pricing strategy’ and sell subscriptions to an email alerting system that would send you up-to-the-minute lists of articles that everyone but you already knew about.

The sad thing about this strategy is that anthropology feels itself to be so fractured that I think people — especially non-tenured people — are desperate for some sort of shared common ground that they could latch on to as ‘what anthropologists actually know and talk about’. So much of contemporary work these days consists of pieces so short and without a ‘boring’ literature review that you must carefully read between the lines to understand what went on in the room where the conference on global assemblages was held. Or… perhaps this is not a new thing?

If you can find a way to turn this cynical plan for self aggrandizement into a way of knitting the diverse communities of anthropology into a coherence whole with a well-defined, democratically defined canon please let me know in the comments below.

I love anthropology because it is the discipline that takes seriously the idea that our common humanity with those we study is a boon and a strength, not an impediment that distort objective judgment. It works with and works through the fact that we can be powerfully changed by our research, and that this change is a strength. I love the fact that we stick with the project of ethnography despite the fact that it is aa project of telling the stories of others, an entitlement to be earned, not a right to representative authority that can be assumed.

The other day for a project I read the tables of contents for every issue of American Anthropologist from 1900 to 1960. One of the articles I came across was called “Columns of Infamy”. I love that.

I love anthropology’s willingness to compare anything to anything else and to study anything under the sun. If people have done it — or thought about doing it — it’s not off-limits. And I love that fact that we can compare people who think they were abducted by aliens in Arkansas in the 90s with ascent to heaven narratives from Sumer written thousands of years earlier.

I love our regional, middle-range expertise: where people call soda coke and where they call it pop, how far south the cultural syndrome of the vision quest extends, and how lycra got marketed to the women’s movement in the 1960s.

But I also love our willingness to completely throw the middle range to the wind, our ability to start with a local taboo against eating bandicoots and ascending to universal theories of human anxieties about embodiment. We drive the philologists mad, which is ok with me.

I love anthropology’s protean genres — our ability to articulate with public health, philosophy, english literature, and military intelligence. When we say we will study anything, we are talking just as much about adjacent disciplines — and they are all adjacent — as we are people out in the world. At the same time, when locked into a four-field configuration like an X-Wing with foils extended into attack position, we really do have some answers to some important questions about what it means to be human. And if the physical anthropologists want to go talk to physicists about strontium isotope analysis, who can blame us for having lunch with someone who studies French literature?

Anthropologists can find anything interesting, and I love that about the discipline. You meet someone and ask what they are studying and they say “rodeos as cultural performance” and heads start nodding. You drive past a garage sale and stop the car in the middle of the street and say “they’re… selling… old lampshades…” And yet at the same time we are incredibly jaded. More fears in the Andes that aid workers are using syringes to suck the fat out of people’s bodies as they sleep? Well that’s not very surprisng, is it?

I love anthropology’s ability to take people’s beliefs incredibly seriously one minute and then to totally ignore them in the next. That’s not witchraft, you fool, that’s your anxiety about your social organization. Except, no wait, what if there are witches? Biology? You think that stuff at the bottom of the microscope is ‘reality’? Have you read Rheinberger’s book on the history of the ‘discovery’ of protein synthesis?!?! Except, actually, this whole ‘cooperative breeding’ thing does knit together what we know about primate behavior, evolution, and the human capacity for culture. Hmmm….

I love that fact that anthropologists refuse to give up on the fact that a two hundred page book has more insight and value than ten twenty page articles. I love the fact that we are willing to grasp the nettle of style instead of pretending it isn’t an issue. I love that fact that we believe our subjectivities add value to our scholarly work, rather than contaminating it.

Above all I love how anthropology, a science of the human, articulates with our lives: we study kinship, and raise children. We read about enculturation, and we teach students. We analyze power and we try to create a democratic, just world. Our discipline is connected, intimately and irrevocably, to our whole persons — and that’s what I love about it most of all.

This won’t work for several reasons: First, because of my position on the earth, it is probably not Valentine’s Day where you are. Second, there is a strong chance that I’m opening the flood gates for endless cynical, bodice-ripping parodies. But I’d still like to give it a shot.

This idea is simple: in the next seven days, for a few thousand words, somewhere public on the Internet, write about why you like anthropology. Then we’ll make the guys at Neuroanthropology do a round up.

Back in the good old days of last month, when #AAAfail was on everyone’s lips, I suggested that we ask anthropology bloggers to provide ‘creeds’ or statements of belief about what anthropology was or should be. I let the idea drop because it seemed sort of dogmatic and unfun to list what you think The Deal is with anthropology. I’m hoping that the Valentine’s Day format will help accomplish a similar thing, but with a little bit of fun thrown in.

So let’s see whether anyone wants to take up the V-Day challenge in the next week and talk about what what anthropology is and why they like — nay, even love — it. Get cracking!

What do most anthropologists think anthropology does? What do the terms they use to evaluate it mean to them? To the best of my knowledge, we simply have no answer to this question beyond our impressions that ‘cultural anthropologists are taking over’. As a scientist (in the general sense of the term) my training tells me the first step in resolving the issues raised by #AAAfail is to get some data on the phenomena we want to study.

Now, one body that would seem to be the obvious candidates to do that would be AAA themselves. After all, we know they can run surveys: I for one feel like I get emails requesting me to take them all the time. Why not design a research program to spend, say, 10 months figuring out what anthropologists actually believe their discipline is about? The results would be a lot more interesting than those produced by other surveys the AAA has run, most of which seem to focus on how many times a week I read the AAA blog and how likely this is to make me want to donate money to them.

But of course this won’t happen, because it would actually mean the genuine democratic assessment of member’s beliefs in a way that could change things, which is a lot more trouble than most of the people running AAA want. Instead I think we are probably on our own on this one.

What if, as an alternative, we started a grassroots movement to say, in a public and synthesizable way, what we thought anthropology was about? An anthropologist’s creed, as it were. They would have to be short, a paragraph each, and address (hopefully in the same order) a concrete number of issues: what the word ‘science’ means to them, what disciplines are adjacent to anthropology, what research methods are important, the role of the analyst, the appropriateness of politics involvement, and so forth.

There are enough anthropology bloggers out there these days that I bet we would have a pretty nice hunk of empirical material to work with — even if it wasn’t a scientific random sample. Since it would be a chance for bloggers to narcissistically reflect on themselves, participation would be high. And then we could just make Daniel Lende summarize it all up for us over at Neuroanthropology…. :)

What say you, is it time for a round of anthropological creeds?

Saturday evening, after the SANA business meeting and a catfish po-boy, I slinked back to my cheap hotel for a change of clothes and to get the address of The Ironworks studio on Piety Street. It turns out hailing a cab in New Orleans on a Saturday night can take awhile, especially when you’re in the CBD. And when I did get a cabbie, he confessed to not knowing where Piety Street was and his sole map seemed to be a tourist brochure which only listed major intersections. (“Here put these on,” and he gave me his reading glasses as if this would help.) I bargained that waiting to catch another cab would take longer than navigating with a lost cabbie and so we set sail on the streets of New Orleans.

After the confusion, a train, and about six blocks of streets without names we arrived. The Ironworks was an ideal setting for this experiment in art and anthropology. At the end of a city neighborhood, under the comforting glow of the street lamps, the building suggested a past life as a warehouse or place of light industry. Inside a high fence folks gathered around a keg of beer or perched on picnic tables on the edge of a interior yard whose distance brought darkness and a sense of privacy. This is where the robots roamed, clacking and blinking.

Inside I soon found my friends, alums from my alma mater New College – many of us became professional anthropologists – had agreed to swarm the Swarm. Much to my surprise there were even some undergrads who spotted me right away by my tattoo of the school logo and a fellow from my class who became a criminal lawyer and now lived right down the street. Also there were tamales. And a band of noise musicians. It was good crowd to be in, a mix of ages, anthropologists and artists.

Swarm was like a poster session on acid. What narrative there was appeared in sudden snippits and disjointed revelations. There was a clear connection to the human, it remained consistently relevant to anthropology throughout. Then it sent out rhizomes tapping into relationships with other living things: animal, plant, microbe. Themes of interdependence emerged alongside those of dominance. And hidden ecologies, networks of bioculture where history, gender, and trade play out alongside pathogens, evolutionary fitness, and geographic isolation shattered by human behavior.

There were no noble savages to be found in this clearing of naturecutlures. Indeed, romantics were largely absent while the surrealists, with their love of the found object and the psychoanalytic, were embraced with revelry. The moral seemed to be that we all would do well to follow their example and play. Just a little. Play and see where the transgression takes you.

The media present at Swarm was varied. There was painting, sculpture, fashion, architecture, collage, video, photography, and installation art. There was even a irruption of performance art as a troupe of actresses shared a interspecies home pregnancy test: injecting urine into a frog. Anthropologist Eben Kirksey hovered on the stage above them interjecting commentary on the consequences of this practice for the global health of amphibians. At the conclusion of the performance he seemed to mock the commoditization of both art and animals, declaring that his frog pregnancy test was available for sale. Only $120.

Amid the imaginary animals and recycled science of Swarm I thought back to an art installation I curated in “the field” while conducting my dissertation research. For the first time I reflected on how the installation became a part of my ethnographic methodology. Like a lot of fieldwork it was happenstance that I came to curate that installation at all, but it was very productive for me. To have art, video, photography, and props thematically arranged, set aside in a space and made available to the public I was trying to reach. I left Ironworks with a great deal of admiration for the artists and anthropologists involved and a new appreciation of my own work.

Its rare to get that from a text. Rare enough that when you find that special essay or book that speaks to you it soon gets devoured by dog ears, underlines, and manic notes in the margins. We all have those special books. But folks, there’s more to anthropology than the written word. Swarm made this plain like a compulsory fit of deja vu. I remember now. There’s an excess to what we do that doesn’t fit in conventional ethnographic text. Poetry, performance, and art are lurking just beyond our peripheral vision.

Turn your head.

[Andre Breton] was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded,” in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.
…
They bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point of explosion. What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at the decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone’s lips?

Suan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing

More generally, throughout [Benjamin's Arcades Project], the image of the “ruin,” as emblem not only of the transitoriness and fragility of capitalist culture, but also its destructiveness, is pronounced.

Six Flags New Orleans, October 2010. Via.

Kathleen Steward, A Space on the Side of the Road

A rambling rose vine entwined around a crumbling chimney remembers an old family farm, the dramatic fire in which the place was lost, and the utopic potential clinging to the traces of history. Objects that have decayed into fragments and traces draw together a transient past with the very desire to remember. Concrete and embodied absence, they are continued to a context of strict immanence, limited to the representation of ghostly apparitions. Yet they haunt. They become not a symbol of loss but the embodiment of the process of remembering itself; the ruined place itself remembers and grows lonely.

Louis Armstrong Park, November 2010. Via.

Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum

Essential to this montage was the merging of myth with nature that had so appealed to Benjamin in his study of the figure of the storyteller. Here, history as ruin or petrified landscape took center stage, as if the succession of human events we call history had retreated into stiller-than-stiller things entirely evacuated of life – like those monumental things, those great bodies of gravel… millions of cubic yards heaped in the jungle, moved by the hands of slaves and now covered by forest.

Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris” in Cultural Anthropology, 23(2)

In its common usage, “ruins” are often enchanted, desolate spaces, large-scale monumental structures abandoned and grown over. Ruins provide a quintessential image of what has vanished from the past and has long decayed. What comes most easily to mind is Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, the Acropolis, the Roman Coliseum, icons of romantic loss that inspired the melancholic prose of generations of European poets who devotedly made pilgrimages to them. In thinking about the “ruins of empire” we explicitly work against that melancholic gaze to reposition the present in the wider structures of vulnerability and refusal that imperial formations sustain… to what people are “left with”: to what remains, to the aftershocks of empire, to the material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things. Such effects reside in the corroded hollows of landscapes, in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the microecologies of matter and mind. The focus then is not on inert remains but on their vital refiguration. The question is pointed: How do imperial formations persist in their material debris, in ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of people’s lives?

Here is how they orient the problem:

What do a self-managed arts and social squat in downtown Madrid, the monthly Critical Mass cycling assertion movement, or a new media and digital cultural public organisation working at the intersection of art, technology and science, have in common?

All of them, we want to suggest, express novel forms of socio-technical experimentation: precarious and very often temporal entanglements in which an abandoned building is turned into a public and open cultural centre; city streets are parenthetically transformed into bicycle-friendly environments; or the call-for and inclusion of amateurs in the production of cultural and artistic works redefines the terms of institutional expertise. In all of them a certain politics of the urban is enacted; all of them are prototypes of new modes of city life.

Prototypes have acquired certain prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Developers are here known for releasing beta or work-in-progress versions of their programmes, as an invitation or call for others to contribute their own developments and closures. An important feature of prototyping in this case is the incorporation of failure as a legitimate and very often empirical realisation. But prototyping has also become an important currency of explanation and description in art-technology contexts, where the emphasis is on the productive and processual aspects of experimentation. Medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives, dorkbots, open collaborative websites or design thinking workshops are further spaces and sites where prototyping and experimentation have taken hold as both modes of knowledge-production and cultural and sociological styles of exchange and interaction.

Common to many such endeavours are: user-centred innovation, where users are incorporated into the artefact’s industrial design process; ICT mediated forms of collaboration (email distribution lists, wikispaces, peer-to-peer digital channels), or; decentralised organisational structures. Some economists favour the term ‘open innovation’ to describe an emerging production paradigm. From a historical and sociological angle, however, the backdrop of such cultures of prototyping is not infrequently connected, if in complex and not always obvious ways, with the do-it-yourself, environmental, countercultural and recycling movements spanning the 1960s right through the 1980s. Prototyping, then, as both a means and an end of social re-production. Around this notion of prototypes we have organized a conference under the title of Prototyping cultures: social experimentation, do-it-yourself science and beta-knowledge in which diverse proposals of researchers working around this notion of prototyping will be discussed.

This is good as a starting point, but there is something not quite there about it yet that I hope the conference will bring out. For one, prototyping has a pretty diverse set of meanings in different locations–from engineering and computer programming to architecture to industrial design to art. Cetainly we don’t talk much about prototyping in anthropology, but we do it: we try out ideas, we half-form theories, we make unwarranted assertions in order to see how they might fly. But does the diversity of meanings facilitate a metonymy across cultural and professional locations, or does it erase distinctions? Secondly, it’s pretty clear that prototype can mean two quite different things: 1) a first try, an experiment, a temporary solution, an object to think with and 2) a standard, a reference object, the first instance of something against which all others are compared. Do these two meanings not pull in opposite directions when we are talking about something like “social experimentation”? On the one hand a tendency towards flexibility, ad hocracy, and a emphemeralization of appropriate knowledge, and on the other towards things like definitive works, standard classifications and a certain fixing of the future?

I’m curious if the proposal resonates with people here. Feel free to provoke Alberto and Adolfo, I’ve suggested to them that they might want to test their prototype here…

You crave a different meme, something old school, circa around 2009. You could go to the YouTube Classics app, but strangely your favorite video never made it to 100 million views and so wasn’t promoted to YouTube Classics. Your television system is connected to the internet but the public internet browser app is buried in the systems folder on your networked TV. Besides, if you could find the browser app you can’t find a keyboard to type out search terms. You drop the idea of following a personal impulse and go with what you can see through the window of the professionally curated suite of applications.

This description of a limited and safe television viewing experience of the future is meant to evoke a feeling that the limitless content and freedom that we associate with internet video is quickly being truncated by the hardware and software engineers in cahoots with the content app designers to make a much more safe, convenient, and professional internet. This is quite easy to see in the world of internet video—once the land of the most subversive, graphic, and comic content possible—is now being overhauled by professionals producing, curating, optimizing, and streaming ‘quality’ videos to homes on proprietary hardware. Many of us interested in the democratization of media, the absence of conglomerate consolidation, the presence of “generative” digital tools, video activism, and indigenous media should be concerned by these trends. This era will be seen as the historical pioneering era of internet video idealism (2005-2009).

Earlier this month, in re-introducing Apple’s internet connected TV set top box, the iTV, Steve Jobs claimed that people want “Hollywood movies and TV shows…they don’t want amateur hour.” What Jobs is saying is that we are entering a new era of professionalism—gone is the wild Darwinian kingdom of video memes, the meritocracy of the rabble rousers, the open platforms equally prioritizing the talented poor as well as the rich. Jobs has never been one to parrot the ‘democratization of media’ ideal. Never one championing collective design or the wisdom of the crowd (if only to fanatically buy his hardware), Jobs firmly believes in the auteur, the singular virtuosity of the genius designer, engineer, and director to make a professionally superior object of art and function. The upcoming golden age of ‘quality’ professional content will be ruled by Jobs and his ilk at HBO, Pixar, Hulu, LG, and Vizio.

Jobs’ vision is but one example showing that the pioneer age of the free and open culture of internet video is ending. Current TV, from 2005-2008, aired 30% user-generated documentaries and produced a cable television network that modeled democracy. Today they are taking pitches only from top Hollywood TV producers. The YouTube Partner’s program, like the very talented Next New Networks—the talent agents for Obama Girl and Auto-Tune the News—culls the ripest and most viral video producers from YouTube and optimizes them for the attachment of profitable commercials. Once pruned and preened, these YouTube cybercelebrities are promoted on the hottest real estate on the internet, YouTube’s frontpage, making 6-figures for themselves while finally making YouTube profitable.

Subcultural activities going mainstream is nothing new, the radical 60s cable guerilla television crew, TVTV, went from making ironic investigations into the 1972 Republican and Democratic conventions to making regular puff pieces for broadcast. World of Wonder, the queerest television company in Hollywood, has been bringing the sexual and gender underground to mainstream cable television for decades. For examples, see my documentary on World of Wonder.

But it is the first example regarding IPTV—internet-based direct to consumer ‘television’ such as Apple’s iTV—that will bring only the best of internet video to the home that most concerns me. The professional domestication of internet video in the home, I fear, will forever wipe out the memory of the wicked and subversive video memes of the YouTube past. With it will go the very ethos of participatory video culture. My colleagues in the Open Video movement can collectively design the hell out of open video apps, editing systems, protocols, and videos standards but no one using these free and open source video systems will be seen if proprietary IPTV covers both software and hardware, internet and television, in both the home and the office.

The process I am describing can best be articulated as a historical process of professionalization. The wild world of amateur video—its production, promotion, and distribution procedures—is moving from the realm of prototyping, beta-testing, and experimentation to expert production, algorithmic optimization, and alpha release five years after its debut on YouTube and Current TV. This professionalization is a historical result of 5 years of industrial development, individual trial and error, and profit-focused talent agencies and creative thinktanks. It is also a product of the historical convergence of the internet and television hardware, as well as the corporate consolidation of content and software around the idea of the app—a professionally designed hardware/software/content peephole into a small fraction of the internet. More anthropological however is the historical transformation of the subculture into the culture. This has been happening forever and is the engine of popular culture and we shouldn’t be so hip and retro as to bemoan it. But we should be concerned with the loss of that realm of artistic and political potential encoded in the free and open internet. The “golden age” to follow this pioneering phase will be as innovative as the golden age of television as we welcome the equivalent of I Love Lucy, Friends, and Lost and along with it the return to spectatorism, canned laughter, and the proliferation of middle class values.

So if it’s closing down, it must have failed, right? There must be no money in digital publishing of scholarly works, right? This must be proof that the only way to make money is with strong intellectual property rights held by massive conglomerates, right? Wrong Wrong Wrong. RUP’s closing is a crystal clear case of something entirely different: bad university administration. The decision, despite the claims in the various articles, had absolutely nothing to do with the viability of the ideas, or the expertise of the staff, or the realities of the marketplace. Instead, it had everything to do with short-sighted, self-important, autocratic management of a university by administrators whose interests are hard to identify though clearly at odds with any possible goal of producing high quality scholarship. (And don’t get me started about the other recent decision to sell the student-run 50K watt radio station, KTRU, one of the best in the country. Sign the petition)

As a board member of Rice University Press, a former employee, and a participant observer in the whole experiment, I’ve had a worms-eye view the fiasco as it has unfolded. I won’t detail all the ways in which RUP is innovative, but for those in the business, i’ll just say: you should all be madly copying their ideas, because RUP had and has no real competitors. Do not be deterred by the shutdown: take advantage of the fact that one less rich university is out there spending $$ on something innovative.

The first lie being circulated is that Rice University Press is being shut down. This was not the plan, in fact, through the hard work of the editor in chief and a network of people in scholarly publishing, the plan was to take RUP and turn it into a national press freed from the short-sighted penny-penching mixed up priorities of a small research university. In hindsight, they should have done this years ago.

Rather than make a careful timed announcement of this transition with the assistance of the press, however, the administration of Rice University chose to annouce that they had decided to shut down the press, in a letter sent to several foundations who were involved. Predictably the foundations were surprised, the announcement found its way onto a blog, where it was then picked up by responsible journalists doing their job and reporting what they had discovered.

And this is how I found out about the planned transition. And I’m on the board. That’s a form of autocratic leadership that belongs in a prison, not a university. Not even evil corporations get that kind of free pass when it comes to decision making.

And this is just the cherry. The whole experiment of the Press has been severely underfunded, stonewalled and victim to short-sighted, administrators’ pipe-dreams of either untold riches (huh? academic publishing is a coal mine, recall, not a gold mine) or just downright ignorance and confusion about the state of academic publishing today. None of the severe problems that face scholarly publishing today were taken seriously by the administration, and yet high… no… nigh miraculous expectations were both built up and accepted around the press. In short, Rice university gained a huge bump in reputation by launching the initiative at a time when everyone in the business agreed there are huge problems to solve, and then essentially pulled the plug on it before it even got started.

Consider this: RUP has had, for the duration of its existence (and not by design) exactly one (1) employee, the editor in chief, Fred Moody. In what turns out to have been a bad decision on probably everyone’s part, Moody was never actually located at Rice. So not only did it have only one employee, it didn’t have an office. It didn’t even have a proverbial garage. This would be fine for the start-up phase, say the first 6 months to a year, but not as a permanent business model. Despite that, Moody did superhuman amounts of work. As an external review report put it “currently the EIC is primarily a production editor who also evaluates unsolicited manuscript submissions, though he also appears to be doing everything from copy editing to distribution. ” Add to this fact that the entire subsidy for RUP from Rice (as reported in the above articles) was on the order of $150-200K. Let’s pretend Moody was paid a living wage and maybe some rudimentary benefits, and that the web designers and Connexions staff were given some peanuts to do what they do, and that Moody’s phone calls and mail costs were covered, and that there was money for all those other things from toilet paper to copyright license fees that need to be paid…and number ends up looking pretty poor. Even if the idea was to recoup that subsidy through sales (and it never was), you’d have to spend a lot more and publish a lot more books, and maybe hire someone to market them so that they might actually get bought.

If you judge the experiment in digital publishing on these facts, it’s sure to look like a failure, but the failure is not in the vision or ideas articulated by the press, but a simple failure to maintain good business judgement. It speaks volumes about how university administrators and many others (including many academics) see academic publishing: as something where no labor is required, only a great big print-a-book machine, a warehouse and some stamped envelopes. Moody, therefore, had to pick up all the slack: soliciting, reading, finding reviewers, managing the review process, communicating with authors, overseeing the website, accounting, copyediting, worrying over permissions, communicating with the board, design, marketing, promotion, distribution, as well as day to day operations. You can’t run a good press that way. You can’t even run a bad press that way for long. I said as much to the board when we started, though no one seemed to hear me.

But it gets worse. The external review report I mentioned very clearly recommended to the Rice administration that the press be continued and re-organized, and that it become more integrated with the Library, the Center for Digital Scholarship and the Humanities Research Center (all of which are well-regarded at Rice, and which mirror similar initiaives at many other universities). If it could do that, the reviewers stated “We are persuaded that, despite the deep crisis being confronted by university presses, there is indeed a niche for an innovative new model and that RUP would be well positioned to carve out a distinctive leadership position within this niche in the absence of competitors.”

So what did Rice University do? Did they consult the board? Nope. Did they have a discussion with anyone about how to move forward? Apparently not. What they did was choose to shut the press down instead. I suppose it’s the prerogative of the administration to capriciously begin and end whatever projects they see fit to, but make no mistake: it says nothing about the quality of these projects, the commitment of the people involved, the urgency of the problems that need solving; it only suggests that there is no real connection between the people in power, and the people who work for Rice.

The sad part is that all the good ideas, and all the needed experimentation are being drowned in the fiscal autocracy of university administration. And Rice is not alone here. I had good experiences there, and many of the people in administration are well-meaning, thoughtful, creative people. This case is just one small speck of dirt on the tip of an iceberg-sized problem facing scholars today as they consider not just how to publish their research (hint: press the “publish” button) but more importantly, how to get their research to have an impact (hint: this requires lots of people, money and time). In the humanities like art and architectural history, which was one of Rice’s “niche” markets, it’s even more pressing, and RUP was a beacon, and hopefully will continue to be a beacon in it’s non-Rice form. Most scholars in the humanities seem to have their heads very firmly buried in the sand when it comes to the problem of scholarly communication–even my fellow board members seemed more eager to crow about the necessity of mainting high standards of rigorous peer review than to face either the challenges or opportunities in scholarly communication. But, as they say, with friends like these…

Fortuntaly for ex_Rice University Press, Moody built up one extremely exciting series: the Literature by Design project. I for one hope that the project goes ahead, finds funding as a national press, and the Rice faculty and administration see the folly in failing to properly support and encourage this experiment.

Next week as many as 50,000 people will inhabit Black Rock City, a temporary metropole constructed by volunteers for a week of personal expression and community celebration on the barren alkaline plains of a Nevada desert a half-days drive from Silicon Valley. This is Burning Man, a radically participatory event where a lot of people who labor in the digital creative industries work out collaborative utopias that make their way–the theory goes–into the social networking software and platforms they make and ask us to populate with our creative surplus, communal energy, and visually expressive humanity. The techno-culture historian Fred Turner states that Burning Man is a ‘sociotechnical commons’—the cultural infrastructure for the digital media industries of California. This is an attempt to document how and why Burning Man is a “proof of concept,” “beta test,” and practical experiment for the engineering of networked publics.

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I’ve attempted to link an outrageous event to important technological and economic digital systems used by billions of humans. The goal is to see how internet practices in virtual spaces are coconstituted by actual world practices in material spaces. Savage Mind writer Rex coolly said CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s goal with Facebook is to “scaffold” sociality–strap supportive beams to the human-to-human communication network that presently exists or might not exist without the structured arena. Rex has it right. Social media and social events, like the virtual and the actual, are coconstructed. And yet, something still trumps this transcendence of body-mind duality.

The commercial imperative looms over the users of corporately-made social media just as the end of the week at Black Rock City haunts the freedom-accustomed Burner. In a series of moves, Current has increasingly pulled back from their mission to democratize media production. In a tense economy and with venture capitalist money running thin, Current has moved to capitalize on its major asset, its cable license, through abandoning the VC2 program and relying on traditional professional programming.

Burning Man, on the other hand, remains a valiant, excessive, and privileged materialization of the ideal sociality coded into and by internet culture. Last year around this time I wrote about the emerging tourism industry in Black Rock City, But for now, the Black Rock Foundation does a tremendous job with a skeleton staff, grants art funds to hundreds of artists, and facilitates a relatively commercial free environment. As a non-profit with a seasonal ecstatic event, Burning Man has an easier job than Current of retaining its mission, a for-profit firm in a fiercely competitive TV market responsible for 24 hours of programming 365 days a year.

Openness, liberation, transparency, relativity, democracy, trust, non-privacy, and collaboration are the shared origin myths of the activists and planners of the internet and Burning Man. These ideals are coded into digital architecture in Silicon Valley and other areas around the Black Rock Desert and distributed for free use throughout the world. These digital social systems and event organizations are molded by their missions and driven by the necessity to optimize the growth of their organizations. Every ideal has a shelf life cut short usually by the profit necessity. The compromises to the mission that commercialization requires are the instances to monitor when adjudicating the sustainability of the social entrepreneurship model.

The basic idea is simple. CA creates a web page with links to five articles written between 2009 and 2003 which are all thematically related. The articles are open access (huzzah!), and the web page includes a brief editorial introduction and a link to other articles which are related but which did not, apparently, make the cut.

Now, the idea of anthologizing greatest hits from a journal in order to present a picture of the past that enables research in the future is not a new idea. Colonialism and Culture collected several classic history/colonialism/power papers from Comparative Studies in Society and History, there is a three volume collection of papers from American Anthropologist, and Ethnos (I think it was) also did an edited volume of its political anthropology articles. Sage specializes in bookifying special issues of journals (such as Studying Elites Using Qualitative Methods, a volume which is, sadly, largely off the radar of the new business anthropology) and the line between journal, conference, and anthology has become so tenuous over at Theory, Culture, and Society that they seem at times officially Beyond Genre.

But what is so new and interesting about CA is exactly the fact they they are not publishing this as a physical book. It is easy to see why — in an era of proliferating PDFs the value of physically collocating these essays has sharply declines (and remember, it used to be quite a value). CA is adding value to their work by selectively filtering it and, of course, making it available to everyone. What does it mean to anthologize merely by linking? It’s a fascinating question.

First, it makes us start to see the similarities between the edited volume and other genres that we might not have understood as being related to it. Is this a digital anthology or a syllabus? Is it an edited volume or a reading list? Is it a web site or a course reader? Syllabi, readers, and reading lists create usable pasts for students, while edited volumes are often authoritative presentations of work which in turn spawns new work. I guess I’ve always understood that both of these involve renarrating the past to move into the future, but here the similarities are especially striking.

Second: Because it is all links all the way down, there is no reason that CA had to stick merely with CA articles. Why not create a more wide-ranging edited volume? There are issues of rights, of course, as well as the problem of where you stop looking once your purview stops being just one journal and becomes an entire InterNetoSphere. It may be that legal regimes and our own imaginations result in us retaining the ghostly spectre of a physical journal issue in our heads as we imagine anthologization.

Thirdly, of course, is the fact that this is great for CA’s ‘brand’. Open Access means better publicity, and intelligent filtering (the selection of articles is great) mean that CA gets the credit not just for publishing these papers, but for wrapping them up in a nice little package for you. And of course in the future when people cite Mazarella and Ho with religious reverence as founders of The New Thing, CA can say “we were there first”.

At any rate, despite my snarkiness, I think CA has done something really useful and thought provoking, and I’d encourage you to check it out — and who knows, maybe even breathe some life into the forums.

John is writing a new novel, his fourth, called Creation Science. But he’s not independently wealthy, so writing and publishing the book is not free, regardless of its form. Fortunately, there is Kickstarter. For years I’ve been hearing people talk about alternative business plans for publishing, art, movies or music. This is it: a platform where people can pitch projects, have people pledge money to them, and if the funding level is met, the funds are released. There’s no mechanism to monitor whether the project is completed… but pledging a fistful of dollars doesn’t hurt anyone. Good old-fashioned risk-sharing. If you think John’s novel sounds like something that should be written, then pledge away. If you like Cory Doctorow’s books (who is also running a similar experiment in self-publishing), you will probably like Sundman’s as well.

But at the very least: think about what he’s doing. This isn’t vanity publishing. Well it is, but it relies on a pool of people who are willing to feed someone’s vanity. But that’s what the mainstream publishing industry is, except instead of vanity, it feeds on raw exploitative power. We have the technology, we don’t need to go back and read Marx again… just stop and think about it.

John is offering different levels of funding: you can pledge just a little ($5) and get a pdf. That’s basically a donation. Or you can pledge $17 and get a signed copy of the book. That’s a steal. Or you can pledge $750 and get “a souvenir pack of nifty stuff from my Creation Science archives, including my original notebooks, copies of correspondence with my editor, one-of-a-kind mockups, etc. After Creation Science has outsold Harry Potter, you’ll be able to sell this on Ebay for a fortune.” That’s hilarious, and not totally insane.

There are other projects like kickstarter, but none, so far as I can tell that are directed at a scholarly audience in any particular discipline. Imagine what a tool like this might look like for scholarly publishing. Imagine a journal run this way, for example. Topics or collections of research are proposed, along with a funding goal, projects that get funded have money to pay for editorial work, copyediting, promotion, maybe even on-demand publishing of the work. At the very least, it’s an easy way to go open access. Anti-OA people like the publishing staff of the AAA always wave the “pay-to-publish” bogeyman at anyone who argues that our work should be freely available (“OMG. It will cost you $9000 per article, we can’t do that!”). So bypass them. Start your own edited volume and raise what you think you’d need to pay someone to edit and manage it (hey you, yes I’m talking to you, the assistant professor trying to get tenure, you end up doing all that work FOR FREE anyways, what do you have to lose here?). Use your AAA Membership fees to contribute to other people’s edited projects that you think deserve to be published and read. It could engage the population of people who care about your work most. It’s an alternative to conventional grant-writing etc.

But even more than that, it could transform peer review and quality-monitoring. Currently Kickstarter is “invitation only” whatever that means. Imagine a scholarly version in which rather than it being “inivitation only” one has to constitute a mini-editorial board of respected scholars (for whatever value of ‘respected’) who would sign off on a project, peer review it and stamp it with a seal of approval (we do this for free already, or at most for $350 in books). My mind reels with the possibilities this has for improving the sorry state of scholarly publishing today. Kickstarter probably isn’t the right forum for this. In fact, I know it isn’t. But some enterprising people from the university press world could get together and make something like this happen right (hint hint). It could even be a consortium of existing presses, if they could solve the collective action problem of saving themselves from extinction. In fact, they might want to check into Kickstarter’s business model: they get 5% of successful projects. In other words, Step 3: Profit!

The first thing I would do, if I had the power to do so, would be to ban the reading of papers. It seems to me that there is often an inverse relationship between how famous an anthropologist is and how boring their presentations are. All too often they simply read aloud seven to nine pages of dense double spaced text extracted from their most recent publication. Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather read the paper at my own pace, thank you. How about trying to learn from the wonderful TED talks? Although the TED curators seem to be a bit too fond of neoliberal and technocratic solutions to the world’s problems, there is no doubt that the talks one finds on that site are rarely boring.

Secondly, putting all the TED talks up as online video might have something to do with the quality of the talks. Surely this keeps presenters on their toes? The SFAA podcast site is a great example of what anthropologists can do in this regard. This should be standard practice at all anthropology conferences, and included in the conference budget. All too often there are a million talks scheduled at the same time, so it would be great to be able to hear the ones you missed later on. It is a great way to “open access” our conferences.

Third, I’d like to see a little more time devoted to discussion. Lets be honest, fifteen minutes is not enough time to present all your data. It seems to me that anything less than forty minutes is going to be little more than an advertisement for your work, encouraging people to read more if they are interested. So why not keep the papers short, maybe under ten minutes, and open up more time to some real discussion. Make the papers available online for those who want to read them.

Finally, I’ve never been to BarCamp, but it seems to be one of many participant-driven “unconferences” like the citizen journalism one I attended at Wikimania 2007. The entire agenda was determined on the spot, with the second round of topics picking up from where we left off at the end of the first round. I loved how dynamic this approach was, compared with what I’m used to at academic conferences. It would be great to open up the format of anthropology conferences to experiment with these other forms. This could even be extended to after the conference is over. Perhaps there could be some kind of built-in mechanism by which each year’s conference builds on questions raised the previous year?