Hacking Digital Universalism: Ritual, Memory and Enacting Technocultural Futures in the Andes

• In Event: Us and Them: Sociotechnologies of Alterity/Otherness

Abstract

Channeling the promise of unbounded global interconnection, and projected as the key to optimizing individual and system-wide productivities alike, networked digital technologies have been conjured as the contemporary’s obligatory passage point for entry into a universal path to the technological future. The colonial and chronopolitical underpinnings that mobilize digitality’s spread as the mark, measure and tempo of development, particularly in the Global South, however, have been met with mobilizations of imaginaries for distinct digital cultures and forms of global connection that emerge and extend beyond urban centers of technological innovation. This paper will attend to the entanglements of and experiments in techno-cultural collaboration from rural hack lab spaces in Peru, which distinctly engage materialities of nature, technology, and information to disrupt the dominant logics of digital universalism. By fostering collaborations between diversely situated actors – bridging Latin American technocultural activists, transnational media producers and Andean indigenous communities – such networks press a cosmopolitcal urging to think together “with the unknown,” (Stengers 2010 Cosmopolitics I,76) and explore alternative collective futures through an interfacing with multiple local pasts.

Author

• Anita Say Chan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign