Inspiration

This site is inspired by so many great people. Join me in celebrating a few of the most important.

Sheila Jasanoff continues every day to teach us all the basics of what it means to be techno-human. Over the course of a transformational, five-decade career, Sheila’s research has laid bare the ways in which the human making of science and technology have re-shaped the forms of reasoning, imagination, and constitution that configure techno-human realities. Her ideas of co-production, bioconstitutionalism, and socio-technical imaginaries are essential to the democratic project of self-understanding and self-governance of techno-human societies. Just as crucially, her indefatigable teaching and organizing and writing have created a global network of people in every sphere of techno-human life who are committed to that project. If we save the cube, it will be because she taught us how to see. Thank you Sheila, for everything that you do.

In politics, as in life, we cannot think, reason, speak, or act, or even begin to experience the world without engaging the faculty of imagination.

Yaron Ezrahi, Imagined Democracies, 2012

Paolo Soleri taught us, in turn, the basics of what it means to design as techno-humans. Like Jasanoff, Soleri recognized that to design technologies was simultaneously to also design the people who inhabited those technologies, as well as the larger universe to which the those technologies were connected. Where Jasanoff brought the eye of an analyst to this task, Soleri brought the eye of an architect. He sought to imagine and create alternative futures and systems in which techno-humans could self-reflexively be and live differently in relation to themselves, their creations, and their environments. He called his creations arcologies: a word that we now use to describe self-contained worlds-in-a-spaceship, like Biosphere 2, Larry Niven’s Ringworld, or the arks that Jen Wolling tends in David Brin’s Earth. Or Soleri’s own Arcosanti. But Soleri’s arcologies are ever always more than Hardin’s simplistic idea of spaceship earth: a glass bubble containing humans and the systems on which they depended for basic life sustenance. Arcologies are techno-habitats designed with the full recognition that humans don’t just live inside of them, they become one with them, becoming techno-human. If we save the cube, it will be because Soleri taught us to redesign it to be sustainable, to be a place worth inhabiting, and to nurture a form of techno-humanity worth being.