Tuesday evening on Earth. I’m on my way to London for a very nice coolhunting project.
In her latest book, Ethno-design — Reinventing Innovation to (Sur)vive in the 21st Century, anthropologist Fanny Parise discusses industrial animism. In other words: our growing tendency to attribute intentionality, agency, and even emotions to technological objects (AI, algorithms, robots, and so on). A permanent simulation of humanity, and not one without risks.
But what happens when an object tucked away in a drawer suddenly comes back to life, almost fifteen years later? That is what happened to me last week when I changed the battery in my old Xperia.
A versioning of our lives?
Software developers often talk about versioning as “the mechanism consisting in preserving the version of any software entity so that it can easily be retrieved, even after newer versions have appeared and been deployed.”
Applied to our digital lives, the idea is dizzying: where have the previous versions of ourselves gone? W…
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