Forthcoming Events
When Technologies Become Traps: Workshop
23 May 2025, Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), University of Oxford
What made Alan Turing, James Lovelock or particle physicists in the mid twentieth century turn to idioms of capture, containment or entrapment to describe their technological achievements? From Turing’s staging of the imitation game in a “telepathy-proof room” to Lovelock’s design of the Electron Capture Detector and his understanding of the thermodynamics of biochemical reactions as “reversible traps,” or the use of behavioural “captologies” in the formatting of human-computer interactions, a logic of capture became second nature to twentieth-century epistemologies of scientific knowledge production and technological design.
This logic has now blossomed into an all-encompassing form of epistemic and economic value creation. From the capture of attention in digital realms to the capture of carbon in climate action regimes or qubits in quantum computing, the material semiotics of entrapment seems to be the form in which we understand technological action in the world. The lexicon of trap-systems—capture, containment, encapsulation, bootstrapping, deception, deferral, monitoring, simulation, decoy, release, to name but a few—proliferates in so-called “deep tech” start-up companies, funding schemes and governmental agencies.
What should we make of the trap as a paradigmatic way of understanding new technologies? How should we analyse the role that entrapment plays in twenty-first century technoscientific cultures? What conceptual affordances are available in the anthropological analyses of the trap-system, and which investigative pathways do they foreclose?
Workshop programme attached. Please RSVP to javier.lezaun@anthro.ox.ac.uk if you would like to attend.
Please join us for a discussion with Prof. Fabian Muniesa (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation; Mines Paris – PSL) about his new book Paranoid Finance (Polity, 2024). Fabian will be at InSIS and the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography until May 31.
Wednesday 21 May 2025, 2pm-3:30pm, Seminar room, 61 Banbury Road
There is a link between finance and paranoia, and that link may well be inescapable. At the core of financial imagination lies a notion of value – of ‘value creation’ – that is loaded with trouble. This is the trouble of a fragile metaphor: a metaphor of fecund money and future return, of true value and false value, of true value that should be protected from the perils of dilapidation, expropriation and speculation, but whose substance is in fact nowhere to be found. Contemporary conspiratorial, millennialist discourse on money, banking and wealth does not embody a delirious misrepresentation of the logic of finance: rather, it exacerbates the paranoid potentials inherent in mainstream financial imagination. This is the radical hypothesis developed in this book: that of paranoid finance as a sedimentation of the demons that haunt the conventional categories of financial value. Tutorials abound today that guarantee access to secret knowledge about the financial system, to magical currencies that release eternal returns, to legal schemes conducive to personal sovereignty, and to a way out of economic enslavement. They often combine disparate elements of esotericism, conspiratorialism, antisemitism, populism, libertarianism or spiritualism. But as Muniesa shows, they also provide a testbed for a critique of the limits of financial imagination.
Fabian Muniesa is a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), based at Oxford University's School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, April-May 2025. He is a Professor at the École des Mines de Paris (Mines Paris - PSL) and a member of the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation. He is the author of The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn (Routledge, 2014) and Paranoid Finance (Polity, 2024) and the co-editor, with Kean Birch, of Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (The MIT Press, 2020). He develops in his work an anthropological critique of business culture and financial capitalism. His most recent research deals with visions of value in conspiracy theory and their connections with mainstream financial imagination today.
More on Fabian, here: https://www.csi.minesparis.psl.eu/en/people/researchers/fabian-muniesa/
