Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology

Jessa Lingel is assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community. She lives in Philadelphia. How craigslist champions openness, democracy, and other vanishing principles of the early web Begun by Craig Newmark as an e-mail to some friends about cool events happening around San Francisco, craigslist is now the leading classifieds service on the planet. It is also a throwback to the early internet. The website has barely seen an upgrade since it launched in 1996. There are no banner ads. The company doesn't profit off your data. An Internet for the People explores how people use craigslist to buy and sell, find work, and find love-and reveals why craigslist is becoming a lonely outpost in an increasingly corporatized web. Drawing on interviews with craigslist insiders and ordinary users, Jessa Lingel looks at the site's history and values, showing how it has mostly stayed the same while the web around it has become more commercial and far less open. She examines craigslist's legal history, describing the company's courtroom battles over issues of freedom of expression and data privacy, and explains the importance of locality in the social relationships fostered by the site. More than an online garage sale, job board, or dating site, craigslist holds vital lessons for the rest of the web. It is a website that values user privacy over profits, ease of use over slick design, and an ethos of the early web that might just hold the key to a more open, transparent, and democratic internet. "To understand contemporary fears, anxieties, and fantasies about the internet, people need to understand craigslist, a site that embodies a set of 1990s values about the internet that seem alien today. In An Internet for the People, Jessa Lingel offers a rich examination of craigslist, including both its strengths and flaws. This insightful book connects the past to the present in order to inform those who care about the future."-danah boyd, author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens "Lingel fills a gap in current scholarship by providing both a historical and ethnographic account of craigslist, a site that has attained almost mythological status in the popular history of the web. This comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and lucid book is a model for how internet research should be done."-Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy "Lingel astutely reveals the visions and values at the heart of an influential yet understudied platform that has pursued a different path than the data-aggregating, advertising-oriented giants that get almost all the attention these days. The book will change how we think about internet platforms in general."-Thomas Streeter, author of The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet

"Honorable Mention for the 2017 APLA Book Prize, Association for Political and Legal Anthropology" Antina von Schnitzler is an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School. In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy's Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape. Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto-one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle-and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa's transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world. Democracy's Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa's political transformation. "Von Schnitzler provides a well-documented scholarly analysis of threats to democracy in South Africa. Specifically, she analyzes the gap between South Africa's success in conducting open elections and maintaining a relatively open political system and the continued reliance upon illiberal techno-political infrastructure from the previous regime in the form of prepaid meters for such public services as electricity and water." "A savvy account of an overtly troubled nation." "Why does protest in contemporary South Africa focus on seemingly apolitical things such as leaky pipes and water meters? What do these inconspicuous infrastructures tell us about the state's attempt to fashion new democratic citizens? Grounded in deep ethnography, von Schnitzler's book is an imaginative work about the everyday technologies and popular illegalities that form postapartheid life in South Africa."-Brian Larkin, author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria "Democracy's Infrastructure takes an incisive, illuminating look at the technopolitics of water in South Africa. Through close and careful observation, this book reveals how specific technological mechanisms enable and constrain government projects, and how forms of measurement and pricing shape new, market-oriented subjects. This is a major contribution, one that joins the study of social movements and political resistance to the new anthropology of infrastructure in an entirely convincing way."-James Ferguson, author of Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution "Using the example of the prepaid water meter as a starting point, this richly interdisciplinary book explores the politics of infrastructure in post-apartheid South Africa. Its argument is built on extensive primary research combined with a thorough grounding in a wide range of existing literature."-Matthew Gandy, University of Cambridge "A theoretically savvy account of how the distribution of prepaid tech

"Winner of the 2018 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize, Society for East Asian Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association" Priscilla Song is assistant professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Thousands of people from more than eighty countries have traveled to China since 2001 to undergo fetal cell transplantation. Galvanized by the potential of stem and fetal cells to regenerate damaged neurons and restore lost bodily functions, people grappling with paralysis and neurodegenerative disorders have ignored the warnings of doctors and scientists back home in order to stake their futures on a Chinese experiment. Biomedical Odysseys looks at why and how these individuals have entrusted their lives to Chinese neurosurgeons operating on the forefront of experimental medicine, in a world where technologies and risks move faster than laws can keep pace. Priscilla Song shows how cutting-edge medicine is not just about the latest advances in biomedical science but also encompasses transformations in online patient activism, surgical intervention, and borderline experiments in health care bureaucracy. Bringing together a decade of ethnographic research in hospital wards, laboratories, and online patient discussion forums, Song opens up important theoretical and methodological horizons in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. She illuminates how poignant journeys in search of fetal cell cures become tangled in complex webs of digital mediation, the entrepreneurial logics of postsocialist medicine, and fraught debates about the ethics of clinical experimentation. Using innovative methods to track the border-crossing quests of Chinese clinicians and their patients from around the world, Biomedical Odysseys is the first book to map the transnational life of fetal cell therapies. "This fascinating ethnography of global patients, the internet, and Chinese neurosurgeons experimenting with fetal cell interventions marries the existential quest for hope with China's search for wealth and power in the twenty-first century. Biomedical Odysseys is a useful provocation for China studies, medical anthropology, science studies, and medical ethics."-Arthur Kleinman, coauthor of A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering "Exploring an important and timely topic, this book is a welcome addition to burgeoning anthropological studies of the deep entanglements of online and offline worlds, fetal-cell and other experimental treatments, and the translocal networks at play in China's rapidly changing healthcare landscape. Innovative and thought-provoking, this book's ethnographic nuance is unparalleled."-Mei Zhan, University of California, Irvine "This is a breathtaking look at the experimental uses of stem cell technologies in contemporary China. Engaging, articulate, and thoughtful, Song addresses the arenas of stem cell research and experimental therapy at the edges of medicine. She helps readers understand how stem cell therapies become humanized and illustrates the poignant journeys for cures that become entangled in entrepreneurial frameworks of market medicine."-Nancy N. Chen, University of California, Santa Cruz "Song's pathbreaking ethnography interweaves China and medical anthropology with science, technology, and society studies. It details how, in the age of social media, desperately ill North Americans and a charismatic Chinese physician have helped a new field of bioscience in China emerge. Opening windows onto spheres of life and clinical care that few have examined, Song's stunning work will be influential for years to come."-Matthew Kohrman, Stanford University

"Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies" "Finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, Jewish Book Council" "Finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore, Association for Jewish Studies" Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University. She is the author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton). A revealing look at Jewish men and women who secretly explore the outside world, in person and online, while remaining in their ultra-Orthodox religious communities What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever known? Hidden Heretics tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead "double lives" in order to protect those they love. While they no longer believe that God gave the Torah to Jews at Mount Sinai, these hidden heretics continue to live in their families and religious communities, even as they surreptitiously break Jewish commandments and explore forbidden secular worlds in person and online. Drawing on five years of fieldwork with those living double lives and the rabbis, life coaches, and religious therapists who minister to, advise, and sometimes excommunicate them, Ayala Fader investigates religious doubt and social change in the digital age. The internet, which some ultra-Orthodox rabbis call more threatening than the Holocaust, offers new possibilities for the age-old problem of religious uncertainty. Fader shows how digital media has become a lightning rod for contemporary struggles over authority and truth. She reveals the stresses and strains that hidden heretics experience, including the difficulties their choices pose for their wives, husbands, children, and, sometimes, lovers. In following those living double lives, who range from the religiously observant but open-minded on one end to atheists on the other, Fader delves into universal quandaries of faith and skepticism, the ways digital media can change us, and family frictions that arise when a person radically transforms who they are and what they believe. In stories of conflicts between faith and self-fulfillment, Hidden Heretics explores the moral compromises and divided loyalties of individuals facing life-altering crossroads. "[An] absorbing account of how Haredi Jews in contemporary New York use social and other digital media to negotiate religious doubt. . . . It is the personal stories in particular that make Hidden Heretics so compelling."---Giulia Miller, Times Literary Supplement "Engaging. . . . Fader effectively shows how modern apostasy meets hard-line orthodoxy." "Providing us with a detailed examination of how disbelief occurs on a spectrum, Fader pushes us to understand how staying or leaving a religion does too."---Katie Christine Gaddini, Marginalia "Hidden Heretics provides a view of contemporary ultra-Orthodox life from a series of unexpected angles and tucked-away corners."---Naomi Seidman, Public Books "Fader has written a groundbreaking work that delves into the parts of the Orthodox world that many do not even know exist."---Ben Rothke, Times of Israel "Substantial and riveting."---David Zvi Kalman, The Forward "Ayala Fader . . . unpacks one of the most daunting public secrets confronting Haredi communities: the suspicion, or realistic understanding, that there are members of the community who are experiencing life-changing doubt." "[Hidden Heretics] explores, with great insight and sensitivity, the complex existence of double lifers and the conditions under which they live. [Fader's] engaging style makes this fascinating work appeal both to scholars of contemporary Orthodox Judaism and those who study the relationship between technology and society, as well as to the general reader.

"Winner of the ASIS&T Best Information Science Book Award, Association for Information Science and Technology" "Finalist for the Rachel Carson Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science" Christina Dunbar-Hester is associate professor of communication in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism. A firsthand look at efforts to improve diversity in software and hackerspace communities Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support. Christina Dunbar-Hester shows that within this well-meaning volunteer world, beyond the sway of human resource departments and equal opportunity legislation, members of underrepresented groups face unique challenges. She brings together more than five years of firsthand research: attending software conferences and training events, working on message boards and listservs, and frequenting North American hackerspaces. She explores who participates in voluntaristic technology cultures, to what ends, and with what consequences. Digging deep into the fundamental assumptions underpinning STEM-oriented societies, Dunbar-Hester demonstrates that while the preferred solutions of tech enthusiasts-their "hacks" of projects and cultures-can ameliorate some of the "bugs" within their own communities, these methods come up short for issues of unequal social and economic power. Distributing "diversity" in technical production is not equal to generating justice. Hacking Diversity reframes questions of diversity advocacy to consider what interventions might appropriately broaden inclusion and participation in the hacking world and beyond. "[Dunbar-Hester's] conclusions are refreshingly universal and her insights will be valuable to many people seeking to make their industries more diverse and inclusive." "Dunbar-Hester notes that diverse hacking efforts in open technology communities have made some progress toward creating more inclusive environments. But these efforts remain limited in their approach and conflate technological participation with the social power that is an outgrowth of it. Framing diversity in open technology communities as a problem of representation is convenient and does produce some morally good outcomes."---Jenna P. Carpenter, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine "an innovative and valuable work ... Dunbar-Hester's qualitative exploration can serve as a rich foundation for further investigation into the dynamics of intersectional communities, justice work, and technology studies."---Rowan McMullen Cheng, Information, Communication, & Society "Hacking Diversity takes us into the hackerspaces, makerspaces, and unconferences where diversity advocates hack their social order to open up volunteer technologies along multiple dimensions. Dunbar-Hester shows that much more than 'stuff' is produced-issues of gender, race, power, and class emerge and are interrogated. This is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how diversity becomes productive in open technology movements and corporate tech cultures."-Sareeta Amrute, University of Washington "This book provides a clear-eyed critical exploration of diversity advocacy within today's market-saturated culture of open technology, fractured by the sediments of racial capitalism. Dunbar-Hester brilliantly combines historical analysis with ethnographic insights to show why DIY interventions by voluntaristic open techno

Christine Folch is assistant professor of cultural anthropology and environmental science and policy at Duke University. Twitter @christinefolch An in-depth look at the people and institutions connected with the Itaipu Dam, the world's biggest producer of renewable energy Hydropolitics is a groundbreaking investigation of the world's largest power plant and the ways the energy we use shapes politics and economics. Itaipu Binational Hydroelectric Dam straddles the Paraná River border that divides the two countries that equally co-own the dam, Brazil and Paraguay. It generates the carbon-free electricity that powers industry in both the giant of South America and one of the smallest economies of the region. Based on unprecedented access to energy decision makers, Christine Folch reveals how Paraguayans harness the dam to engineer wealth, power, and sovereignty, demonstrating how energy capture influences social structures. During the dam's construction under the right-wing military government of Alfredo Stroessner and later during the leftist presidency of liberation theologian Fernando Lugo, the dam became central to debates about development, governance, and prosperity. Dams not only change landscapes; Folch asserts that the properties of water, transmuted by dams, change states. She argues that the dam converts water into electricity and money to produce hydropolitics through its physical infrastructure, the financial liquidity of energy monies, and the international legal agreements managing transboundary water resources between Brazil and Paraguay, and their neighbors Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay. Looking at the fraught political discussions about the future of the world's single largest producer of renewable energy, Hydropolitics explores how this massive public works project touches the lives of all who are linked to it. "Hydropolitics is a lively account of the political maneuvering that led to the construction and operation of the planet's largest generator of hydroelectricity. It speaks to urgent questions in environmental anthropology while advancing conversations in political and legal anthropology around sovereignty and social theories of the state."-Caroline Schuster, Australian National University "This fascinating and original book explores one of the most unusual feats of politics and engineering of the twentieth century. Itaipu Dam's unique position among megadams as a binational corporation forces us to completely rethink the relationship between energy and sovereignty, and Folch invites us into the story with first-rate research, keen analysis, and narrative verve."-Kregg Hetherington, Concordia University

"Winner of the ICA Outstanding Book Award, International Communication Association" "Winner of the Diana Forsythe Prize, Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing of the General Anthropology Division, and the Society for the Anthropology of Work" Lilly Irani is associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is a cofounder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool Turkopticon. Twitter @gleemie A vivid look at how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and how people try to live that promise Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world's fastest-growing nations. Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others-craftspeople, workers, and activists-as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development. With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all. "... profoundly comparative with important theoretical implications. This book certainly needs to be read carefully and very widely." "Brilliant ethnography."---Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Asian Journal of Social Science ​​​​​​​ "Chasing Innovation challenges dominant discourses and practices enacted in the name of innovation in contemporary India. Irani is an exemplary scholar who combines original research with careful attention to a range of relevant literature. Written with sophistication, nuance, critical insight, and compassion, this book will be a significant contribution across multiple fields."-Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University "A fascinating piece of scholarship on a critically important topic, this book addresses the rise of entrepreneurship in India as a new model of development. Irani captures the characteristics of the entrepreneurial citizen while taking care to show the enduring power of older developmental imaginaries and social hierarchies. This exemplary ethnographic portrait of twenty-first-century entrepreneurialism is sure to have a wide and varied readership."-Ajantha Subramanian, Harvard University "This is a brilliant, incisive ethnography of the culture of entrepreneurial citizens, and of the belief that clever design and disruptive technology can solve poverty by harnessing the 'fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.'"-Vijayendra Rao, World Bank

"Winner of the William A. Douglass Book Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, Society for the Anthropology of Europe" Anya Bernstein is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and the author of Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism. A gripping account of the Russian visionaries who are pursuing human immortality As long as we have known death, we have dreamed of life without end. In The Future of Immortality, Anya Bernstein explores the contemporary Russian communities of visionaries and utopians who are pressing at the very limits of the human. The Future of Immortality profiles a diverse cast of characters, from the owners of a small cryonics outfit to scientists inaugurating the field of biogerontology, from grassroots neurotech enthusiasts to believers in the Cosmist ideas of the Russian Orthodox thinker Nikolai Fedorov. Bernstein puts their debates and polemics in the context of a long history of immortalist thought in Russia, with global implications that reach to Silicon Valley and beyond. If aging is a curable disease, do we have a moral obligation to end the suffering it causes? Could immortality be the foundation of a truly liberated utopian society extending beyond the confines of the earth-something that Russians, historically, have pondered more than most? If life without end requires radical genetic modification or separating consciousness from our biological selves, how does that affect what it means to be human? As vividly written as any novel, The Future of Immortality is a fascinating account of techno-scientific and religious futurism-and the ways in which it hopes to transform our very being. "Bernstein uses history as well as the contemporary landscape to riase questions about the chaging status of the category "human" in increasingly medically engineered bodies. In wonderfully thought-provoking passages, she muses over the relationships between body and mind, biology and technology to rethink, enlarge and playfully undermine the understanding of life itself."---Kate Brown, Times Literary Supplement "A magic dwells. . . By holding these different viewpoints up against each other, [and] Bernstein shows us just how intricate the question of what makes us human really is."---Justine Buck Quijada, Politics, Religion, & Ideology "Bernstein's radiant ethnography captures the intensity and ingenuity of people striving to conquer personal mortality via cryogenic freezing of the body or antiaging procedures, and connects such singular efforts to broader anxieties about the death of the planet, global extinction, and the loss of all human futures."-Alaina Lemon, University of Michigan "Magnificent, brilliant, and compelling, this is a work of the highest erudition, spanning many different areas of ethnography, science, and history."-Nancy Ries, Colgate University "With extraordinary ethnographic detail and theoretical depth, this remarkable book tells the story of the Russian immortalists-champions of life extension and universal immortality. By positioning them within a rich history of Russian thought on the questions of life, death, and ethics, and vis-à-vis current debates in anthropology and science studies, it demonstrates that what is at stake is a biopolitical remaking of the relationship between body and mind, biology and technology, and the very status of the human. It is a must-read!"-Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation "A brilliant, carefully documented, and elegantly written book about contemporary Russian visionaries who are striving to make human immortality a reality. Bernstein has taken on a complex, multifaceted subject that has deep Russian roots and global relevance."-Michele Rivkin-Fish, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"Winner of the CITAMS Book Award, Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association" T. L. Taylor is professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her books include Raising the Stakes and Play between Worlds. A look at the revolution in game live streaming and esports broadcasting Every day thousands of people broadcast their gaming live to audiences over the internet using popular sites such as Twitch, which reaches more than one hundred million viewers a month. In these new platforms for interactive entertainment, big esports events featuring digital game competitors live stream globally, and audiences can interact with broadcasters-and each other-through chat in real time. What are the ramifications of this exploding online industry? Taking readers inside home studios and backstage at large esports events, Watch Me Play investigates the rise of game live streaming and how it is poised to alter how we understand media and audiences. Through extensive interviews and immersion in this gaming scene, T. L. Taylor delves into the inner workings of the live streaming platform Twitch. From branding to business practices, she shows the pleasures and work involved in this broadcasting activity, as well as the management and governance of game live streaming and its hosting communities. At a time when gaming is being reinvented through social media, the potential of an ever-growing audience is transforming user-generated content and alternative distribution methods. These changes will challenge the meaning of ownership and intellectual property and open the way to new forms of creativity. The first book to explore the online phenomenon Twitch and live streaming games, Watch Me Play offers a vibrant look at the melding of private play and public entertainment. "[Taylor's] work expertly builds a historical framework for Twitch and outlines how patterns of behavior have evolved on the platform without overcommitting to any last-word assessments of its influence [and] also demonstrates how invigorating academic scholarship can be when it tries to tackle a subject still in formation."---Jacob Merten, The Velvet Light Trap "well worth reading. . . [A] timely, wide-ranging introduction to, immersion in, and analysis of, Twitch and game live streaming."---Helle Breth Klausen, MedieKultur " Watch Me Play is an accessible text that both legitimizes academic inquiry into live streaming and provides a concrete base from which to build. Taylor uses comprehensible language to explain nuanced practices from gaming, legal, academic, and financial contexts, making this book useful for academics and students, as well as consumers, producers, streamers, and designers."---Janelle Malagon, Popular Culture Studies "Interest in online streaming platforms, especially for games and Twitch, is at its height. This timely and urgently needed book successfully conveys the technical, legal, emotional, and social complexities of what people are doing in Twitch. Providing a nuanced and close-to-the-ground analysis, Watch Me Play will be the go-to work for learning about this gaming experience."-Thomas M. Malaby, author of Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life "Based on years of immersion and research, Watch Me Play is a masterful book and covers an area that has not received much serious study before. Using rich and inventive methods, Taylor makes a compelling argument for thinking about games across media. I loved the writing and learned a great deal."-Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format "If you've ever wondered why anyone would watch someone else playing videogames, this book is for you. Deep, analytical, and comprehensive, Watch Me Play is the greatest written resource on the complex world of internet streaming."-Paul Chaloner, managing director of Code Red Esports

Stephen J. Collier is professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton). Andrew Lakoff is professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. The origins and development of the modern American emergency state From pandemic disease, to the disasters associated with global warming, to cyberattacks, today we face an increasing array of catastrophic threats. It is striking that, despite the diversity of these threats, experts and officials approach them in common terms: as future events that threaten to disrupt the vital, vulnerable systems upon which modern life depends. The Government of Emergency tells the story of how this now taken-for-granted way of understanding and managing emergencies arose. Amid the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of experts and officials working in obscure government offices developed a new understanding of the nation as a complex of vital, vulnerable systems. They invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate the nation's vulnerability, and organized a distinctive form of emergency government that would make it possible to prepare for and manage potentially catastrophic events. Through these conceptual and technical inventions, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff argue, vulnerability was defined as a particular kind of problem, one that continues to structure the approach of experts, officials, and policymakers to future emergencies. "A scholarly tour de force. . . . For those seeking specialization in the anthropology of crises, disasters, and emergencies, this book is required reading."---Roberto E. Barrios, American Anthropologist "A monumental achievement."---Kathleen Tierney, American Journal of Sociology "The Government of Emergency is a thrilling intellectual history . . . [and] an important contribution to a growing line of scholarship that critically approaches the concept of 'disaster' itself."---Ryan Hagen, The British Journal of Sociology "The Government of Emergency is a truly compelling account of the consolidation of a new normative regime of government, one in which vital systems security is a permanent function of the everyday operations of the state. This book is a must-read for our understanding and appreciation of the governmental obligation to protect and sustain life, a crucial insight in this time of global pandemic."-Janet Roitman, author of Anti-Crisis "This original, eye-opening book provides indispensable background to the hopeless, fallible, yet crucial work of coping with modernity's reflexive risks. Collier and Lakoff unearth the obscure federal agencies that gamed out survival strategies for America's essential systems-what we now call 'infrastructures'-during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War."-Paul N. Edwards, author of A Vast Machine "It is now commonplace to say that emergencies are becoming normal, but this was not always so. Collier and Lakoff show how this transition was a matter of redeploying governmental apparatus as well as facing new vulnerabilities. The Government of Emergency is crucial reading for an era of pandemics and climate change, when preparedness is constantly demanded and seldom delivered."-Craig Calhoun, Arizona State University "Collier and Lakoff offer new thinking on the ways in which a range of phenomena, from economic shocks to nuclear disaster, became objects of governance and expertise, with consequences for national and urban politics. This lucidly written book brings the history of disaster management to life."-Marieke de Goede, author of Speculative Security "Collier and Lakoff explore how the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies shaped planning around infrastructure vulnerability during the Cold War and the eras of emerg

"Winner of the Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize, Society for East Asian Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association" "Winner of the Joseph Levenson Post-1900 Book Prize, China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies" Silvia M. Lindtner is associate professor of information at the University of Michigan. She is the cofounder of Hacked Matter and associate director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Twitter @yunnia A vivid look at China's shifting place in the global political economy of technology production How did China's mass manufacturing and "copycat" production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China's governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a "new frontier" of innovation. Lindtner's investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces-makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends-in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production-tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a "new" optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation. Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence. Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers "As a site for transformative maker spaces and technology, Shenzhen is China's first special economic zone and a global center for industrial production. This exceptional book examines the city as laboratory to offer insights on how national policy underwrites this process. Taking on the significant work of framing Shanzai maker cultures and design innovation in the contexts of neoliberalism and precarity, Prototype Nation engages powerful lenses to investigate labor, race, gender, and even happiness."-Nancy N. Chen, University of California, Santa Cruz "Carefully researched and well-written, Prototype Nation is the most comprehensive study of China's maker culture that I know of. It will be the authoritative book on the subject for years to come."-Guobin Yang, University of Pennsylvania "Marshaling rich data and keen insights, Prototype Nation is an extraordinary book. Rare in depth, scope, and sophistication, it speaks to a wide range of audiences, including those in China studies, entrepreneurship studies, and technology studies. This book truly shines."-Gina Neff, University of Oxford

Why software isn't perfect, as seen through the stories of software developers at a run-of-the-mill tech company Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply "good enough." In Middle Tech, Paula Bialski offers an ethnographic study of software developers at a non-flashy, non-start-up corporate tech company. Their stories reveal why software isn't perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise to make software work-or at least work until the next update. Exploring the culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls "MiddleTech," Bialski shows how doing good-enough work is a collectively negotiated resistance to the organizational ideology found in corporate software settings. The truth, Bialski reminds us, is that technology breaks due to human-related issues: staff cutbacks cause media platforms to crash, in-car GPS systems cause catastrophic incidents, and chatbots can be weird. Developers must often labor to patch and repair legacy systems rather than dream up killer apps. Bialski presents a less sensationalist, more empirical portrait of technology work than the frequently told Silicon Valley narratives of disruption and innovation. She finds that software engineers at MiddleTech regard technology as an ephemeral object that only needs to be good enough to function until its next iteration. As a result, they don't feel much pressure to make it perfect. Through the deeply personal stories of people and their practices at MiddleTech, Bialski traces the ways that workers create and sustain a complex culture of good enoughness. Paula Bialski is associate professor of digital sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland. She is the author of Becoming Intimately Mobile and a coauthor of Communication. "A sharp-eyed exploration of everyday life in the trenches of tech, far from the magic sparkle of billionaire CEOs and the cries of their techlash antagonists. This book is a welcome antidote to our cycles of hype and despair."-Fred Turner, Stanford University "While so much popular and academic writing has focused on hacker-techies or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, we seldom have research on the everyday, mundane, often boring-at-first-glance software developers that code and maintain the growing mess of our day-to-day software systems. Bialski's intimate and rich portrayal of Middle Tech developers is innovatively conceptualized, deeply researched, and brimming with critical insight."-Gabriella Coleman, Harvard University "This is a much-needed and refreshingly honest account of computing cultures in the mainstream of established software development/maintenance companies. It makes a significant contribution to demystifying the practical organizational realities and everyday labor of software development, well-articulated within the rubric of 'good enough.'"-Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University

How Mexican and Latinx hackers apply concepts from coding to their lived experiences In Code Work, Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders' personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán shows how these hackers apply concepts from the code worlds to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions-at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics. Merging ethnographic analysis with systems thinking, he draws on his eight years of research in México and the United States-during which he participated in and observed hackathons, hacker schools, and tech entrepreneurship conferences-to unpack the conundrums faced by workers in a tech economy that stretches from villages in rural México to Silicon Valley. Beltrán chronicles the tension between the transformative promise of hacking-the idea that coding will reconfigure the boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and gender-and the reality of a neoliberal capitalist economy divided and structured by the US/México border. Young hackers, many of whom approach coding in a spirit of playfulness and exploration, are encouraged to appropriate the discourses of flexibility and self-management even as they remain outside formal employment. Beltrán explores the ways that "innovative culture" is seen as central in curing México's social ills, showing that when innovation is linked to technological development, other kinds of development are neglected. Beltrán's highly original, wide-ranging analysis uniquely connects technology studies, the anthropology of capitalism, and Latinx and Latin American studies. Héctor Beltrán is assistant professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Code Work is lucid, well-written, and lively. By deftly hitching ethnographic material to literature in anthropology, Latinx studies, science and technology studies, and Mexican studies and history, Beltran has enlarged and enlivened the scope and direction of hacker studies."-E. Gabriella Coleman, Harvard University "Code Work provides a perceptive and wide-ranging critique that will be important not just to technology studies but also to the anthropology of capitalism and Latinx and Latin American studies, which it refreshingly reconfigures."-Rihan Yeh, University of California, San Diego "Héctor Beltrán is a fierce storyteller who takes the reader through the techno-borderlands, where Latinx hackers learn to move across the loops and complications of a sociotechnical 'stack' that transverses the politics of the US/Mexico border. Beltrán's book, featuring beautiful montage illustrations by Daniela Rivero, is a delightful and creative exploration of hacking as learning, querying, and then queering extant relations of technology and power."-Sareeta Amrute, Parsons School of Design, The New School

"Winner of the 2016 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts" Stefan Helmreich is professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Alien Ocean and Silicon Second Nature. What is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how contemporary scientists-biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers-are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual. Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"-as investigating, fathoming, listening-to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis. Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision. "This collection is extremely impressive. The notes and bibliography read like a veritable state-of-the-art of the field; the author has read and imbibed everything and everyone and is in firm command of his disciplinary landscape. Helmreich has been a leader among anthropologists in applying to science a new kind of methodologically sophisticated ethnography."---Oren Harman, European Legacy "In this timely collection of writings on life, water, and sound, one of anthropology's most eloquent essayists delivers a truly sensational analysis of the geobiological politics shaping our multispecies world. Stefan Helmreich has reinvented participant observation for his discipline and beyond in this erudite and prescient work that will appeal to a broad audience."-Sarah Franklin, University of Cambridge "The biological sciences are changing as never before. Sounding the Limits of Life offers an expansive, open vision of how to think about the contemporary life sciences. Drawing not only on anthropology, but also on history, literature, and philosophy, this collection presents riveting insights into life forms at the edges of what we know."-Peter Galison, Harvard University "Expansive and erudite, Sounding the Limits of Life tests the limits of categories central to scientific and humanistic thinking. The book's imaginative fusion of anthropology, science and technology studies, and sound studies extends these fields into places they otherwise would not go."-Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format "A work of brilliant and challenging anthropology, Sounding the Limits of Life takes a fresh look at some key issues in the social sciences, humanities, and biology/ecology. Exploring in detail several sites-the microbiome, the ocean, outer space, the arts, biological laboratories, and academe-this book shows how they connect and why they matter."-Gisli Palsson, University of Iceland and King's College London "This richly textured book is an inspirational contribution to anthropology and science studies. It is certain to stand the test of time as a work of stunning imagination and solid scholarly exploration."-Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College

"Finalist for the 2017 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, Media Ecology Association" Benjamin Peters is assistant professor of communication at the University of Tulsa and affiliated faculty at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. How the digital revolution has shaped our language In the age of search, keywords increasingly organize research, teaching, and even thought itself. Inspired by Raymond Williams's 1976 classic Keywords, the timely collection Digital Keywords gathers pointed, provocative short essays on more than two dozen keywords by leading and rising digital media scholars from the areas of anthropology, digital humanities, history, political science, philosophy, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, and sociology. Digital Keywords examines and critiques the rich lexicon animating the emerging field of digital studies. This collection broadens our understanding of how we talk about the modern world, particularly of the vocabulary at work in information technologies. Contributors scrutinize each keyword independently: for example, the recent pairing of digital and analog is separated, while classic terms such as community, culture, event, memory, and democracy are treated in light of their historical and intellectual importance. Metaphors of the cloud in cloud computing and the mirror in data mirroring combine with recent and radical uses of terms such as information, sharing, gaming, algorithm, and internet to reveal previously hidden insights into contemporary life. Bookended by a critical introduction and a list of over two hundred other digital keywords, these essays provide concise, compelling arguments about our current mediated condition. Digital Keywords delves into what language does in today's information revolution and why it matters. "[A] new and revolutionary publication. . . . Digital Keywords serves as an in-depth interrogation of the meaning and development of digitised language. . . . Those wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the modern, digital world we all inhabit would be well advised to begin by taking a look at this book. Just as Keywords made its way firmly onto reference shelves in the 1970s, so too will Digital Keywords today."---Jade Fell, Engineering and Technology "This a good springboard to spark a discussion about the cultural and social significance of a select set of words in the context of a computer-mediated society and culture." "Digital Keywords interrogates some of the words at the center of our socio-technical world, revealing the way in which the digital has reconfigured culture. This inspiring book is essential for all who are trying to understand our contemporary mediated society. It's a pure delight for anyone who hasn't stopped to think about the power of these words."-danah boyd, founder of Data & Society and author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens "Digital Keywords is fascinating, erudite, informative, and delightful. This is a cabinet of present-day wonders to which I'm sure I'll return many times."-Todd Gitlin, Columbia University "The distinguished contributors of Digital Keywords analyze the ways language has changed as a result of the digital revolution. The result is an engaging and readable tour through important concepts in scholarly debate and public discourse."-Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"Winner of the 2018 CITAMS Book Award, Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association" Christo Sims is associate professor of communication and a founding member of the Studio for Ethnographic Design at the University of California, San Diego. In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. Ethnographer Christo Sims documented the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. Disruptive Fixation is his account of how this "school for digital kids," heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged. Sims shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes-often dramatically so. He traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. Sims offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform-in this case, the students and their parents-play in perpetuating the cycle. Disruptive Fixation offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish-and for whom. "The chronicle of a failure foretold, this remarkably reflexive ethnography of a project aiming at reinventing education via digital devices, managerial transformations, and philanthropic initiatives is an important fable for our times of techno-idealism. Its sobering morality is a call for modesty, lucidity, and honesty with regards to the permanent request for innovation, the immoderate pretension to avant-gardism, and the inflationary rhetoric of cutting-edge research, from which the social sciences themselves are not exempt."-Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton "Sims's book is rich in conceptual tools for analyzing school reform movements. It offers a brilliant explanation for their persistent failures. He argues that projects of reform move through 'cycles of disruptive fixation' that consolidate rather than dissolve class, racial, and gendered inequities. He punctures the hype about techno-philanthropic nostrums for what ails public education. Though some of what he has to tell us is hard to hear, his searching critique is clearly the work of a scholar of concerned and generous spirit. The book should be required reading for anyone who finds themselves the agent or target of similarly misguided benevolence."-Jean Lave, University of California, Berkeley "How do the engines of educational reform so often drive us back to the status quo? Decades ago, the computer industry promised us the tools to transform our schools. Why haven't they worked? In this richly researched analysis, Christo Sims answers these questions and points the way toward new and more effective modes of technological intervention. This book should be required reading for anyone thinking about learning and technology today."-Fred Turner, Stanford University "Christo Sims gives us a front-row seat to an effort to 'disrupt' public schooling with new technology. The story that emerges, in all its messy particularities, shows the way that such efforts often reinforce the very structures that they set out to change. There are powerfu

Joanne Randa Nucho is a Mellon-Chau postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at Pomona College. What causes violent conflicts around the Middle East? All too often, the answer is sectarianism-popularly viewed as a timeless and intractable force that leads religious groups to conflict. In Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, Joanne Nucho shows how wrong this perspective can be. Through in-depth research with local governments, NGOs, and political parties in Beirut, she demonstrates how sectarianism is actually recalibrated on a daily basis through the provision of essential services and infrastructures, such as electricity, medical care, credit, and the planning of bridges and roads. Taking readers to a working-class, predominantly Armenian suburb in northeast Beirut called Bourj Hammoud, Nucho conducts extensive interviews and observations in medical clinics, social service centers, shops, banking coops, and municipal offices. She explores how group and individual access to services depends on making claims to membership in the dominant sectarian community, and she examines how sectarianism is not just tied to ethnoreligious identity, but also class, gender, and geography. Life in Bourj Hammoud makes visible a broader pattern in which the relationships that develop while procuring basic needs become a way for people to see themselves as part of the greater public. Illustrating how sectarianism in Lebanon is not simply about religious identity, as is commonly thought, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon offers a new look at how everyday social exchanges define and redefine communities and conflicts. "Nucho writes about the working-class predominantly ethnic Armenian Beirut suburb called Bourj Hammoud. Based on extensive field research, she explores how in everyday life, institutions, especially the infrastructure layers crisscrossing the community, interact with sectarianism. . . . The book's strength is bringing to life the rich complexity of this densely packed community." "In this thoughtful book, Joanne Randa Nucho tells the story of how electricity, educational and social work facilities, credit services, and mobility infrastructures are imagined, planned, used, and abused. Nucho manages to defamiliarize the familiar and forces us to look at the hidden structures under the surface of social relations more inquisitively and critically."-Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London "Joanne Randa Nucho brilliantly captures the everyday acts that continually reinvent sectarianism and she challenges the assumption that sectarian communities are old and natural. Sectarianism, she boldly argues, is made through municipal organizations, nonprofits, lending institutions, and other establishments that channel resources along sectarian lines. Marvelously ethnographic, Nucho's nuanced book is a must-read for those who believe that 'ethnic,' 'tribal,' 'religious,' and 'sectarian' identities are an ageless given."-Suad Joseph, University of California, Davis "This is a wonderful book, both accessible and compelling. Looking at the complex city of Beirut, Nucho skillfully expands traditional ideas of human and material infrastructure to include areas that are far from ordinary. The discussions of memory and its deployment to shape an uncertain future are incisive and assured."-AbdouMaliq Simone, author of City Life from Jakarta to Dakar "This articulately written and well-argued book investigates sectarianism in Lebanon through networks, infrastructures, and service provision, focusing on Armenian institutions in Bourj Hammoud since their establishment in the 1920s to today. Providing rigorous analysis and rich narratives of urban spaces, homes, social services, and microcredit lending, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon breaks fascinating new ground in the urban anthropology of the Middle East."-Mona Harb, American University of Beirut