Abstract for a paper, via Matei

Some snippets that sound promising:

“The materiality of our contemporary environment is the product of large, to varying degrees global processes involving the collaboration of myriad people; excavating, smelting, soldering, thinking, planning, moving the materials around until they have settled in the forms we can observe here today. Whatever moves upon the surface is the result of this massive human interaction.

The production of the contemporary surface is always a project which requires collusion, as Bruno Latour put it ‘An object cannot come into existence if the ranges of interests around the project do not intersect.’(1) these overlapping ranges of interests constitute society. Latour was speaking of the realisation of complex projects like the VAL suburban rail system in Lille but it can be applied to the spontaneous collaboration between myriad disparate companies comprehended in any contemporary technical product.”

“There is a sociology, and an anthropology of the technological present. Furthermore I claim the physical reality of contemporary objects are materially inscribed with the social processes by which they were generated. Therefore there is an archaeology or an anarcheology of the contemporary surface which reveals social networks and their mores, what Pierre Lemonnier calls ‘Material Culture’.”

“The human technological product is the site of a battle for ideological hegemony, and claims of its neutrality are politically spurious. We could, from today, have a very different world of technical effects and objects, engendering different world-views and sociabilities, if, of course, the ‘ranges of interests’ of enough people involved would intersect to support enough divergent projects.”