And these products and services have now structured our assumptions of what satisfying experiences should be like. We’re finding ourselves in a moment of history where we have perpetuated a fundamentally broken and unjust economic and political system in which it is no longer possible to believe that minor corrections of the sort that electoral democracy used to offer will make the slightest difference to our collective future. We are part of a modern diaspora. Treating Covid-19 as a kind of design probe or prototype is certainly an ambiguous undertaking in the sense that a highly infectious and thus far untreatable virus is perhaps more tragedy than opportunity. The reason everyone admires but practically nobody uses Linux or LibreOffice is because they are not as desirable as their for-profit equivalents. (It is also possible that what you want to stop may put you in trouble as well). Bruno Latour, a French philosopher and anthropologist whose work I’ve learned a great deal from, has started a new research/activist project (as he occasionally does), to collect ideas and experiences related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis. Capitalism, as we know, is very good at connecting and playing to our desires. Read our COVID-19 research and news. This reconsideration is also at the centre of Bruno Latour’s response to the pandemic. It’s a great existential quandary, an agonizingly complex set of problems which — when coupled with being a certain age — runs the risk of looking very much like a midlife crisis, or — worse — the idle musings of handwringing privilege. Management consultant, business ethnographer/ anthropologist, vision enabler, problem solver, facilitator, thinker, writer, reader of books and the web, attentive music listener, blogger, vegetarian, angry optimist, internet dweller since 1992. However, he noted that the scale of changes and decisions to be made to stem climate change are “many times more complicated and more drastic than the ones we have (with the coronavirus)”. Bruno Latour. He said he had received hundreds of responses and was organising workshops. Reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten; Editing by Frances Kerry. I have lingering ideas that being in the same physical space as others offers a “richer” way of interacting, but I’m actually not sure that’s the case. Rather it turns out that one shows us the character of the other with horrific lucidity. He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). At the same time, online shopping and fast, more environmentally friendly deliveries, would have to become a universal pursuit. The pandemic introduced additional questions of how and what to buy without potentially putting others in harm’s way.” https://buff.ly/3hzShpS, “Lifestyle is a powerful force, but if you’ve done right these last nine months, curtailing your own personal freedom for the healthy freedom of others, you’re the real freedom fighter.” https://buff.ly/3hD34zB, "Protest, campaigning and volunteering have become dynamically reinforcing on the American left. Bruno Latour, a French philosopher and anthropologist whose work I’ve learned a great deal from, has started a new research/activist project (as he occasionally does), to collect ideas and experiences related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis. At the same time, I also know that there is a distinction to be made between skill and purpose — that it is quite possible to apply good design methodology in ways that result in equitably designed products and services that don’t necessarily perpetuate wealth or power asymmetries. With new infections slowing, the government announced this week that a gradual easing of its nearly two-month lockdown would start from Monday - signalling a slow return to business as usual. Bruno Latour Twitter Author Contributor Type contributor Read the Latest Issue of Science. Last modified on Thu 26 Mar 2020 08.26 EDT. https://buff.ly/2TNczRx, And in other news: https://buff.ly/38kraMn, “It’s fairly well understood that Hollywood is an important vehicle for projecting American 'soft power.' But in the last ten to fifteen years, the internet has done far more to make the world think like Americans than Marvel movies.” https://buff.ly/2KZ4J6E, “Most office activity will not move to homes or to the cloud but is likely to be redistributed within and between cities, with a variety of new employment areas popping up and saving many people the trouble of commuting to a central business district.” https://buff.ly/2X4ODLg, “Buying just about anything already felt like a moral conundrum. Flying to business meetings or conferences. Sometimes, an irresistible writing prompt presents itself. Search Results: 8 found (sorted by format) ... argued at Christianity Today that advocating for the prioritization of COVID-19 vaccination for incarcerated people could save many lives—and is the Christian thing to do. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: "Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks." The renowned French philosopher of science suggests that the coronavirus emergency should be … With very few exceptions, most “things” could theoretically be bought online and delivered to the home, provided the risk of returning things was relatively low. Increasingly, I think we need to work on what until 8 weeks ago I might have called “design viruses,” products or services that have the properties and desirability of their commercial equivalents but which are specifically designed to resist profit, intellectual property, disposability, negative environmental impact, surveillance/invasion of privacy, etc. The power of the consumer is immense”. “Maybe, if it works, we’ll link them to groups of people who can actually (...) stop something”, he said, adding, “Can we do it politically? So in that sense, when people say we cannot do anything, it’s clearly wrong,” Latour told Reuters in an interview. back to what it used to be in the 1980s. On one hand, as Mr. Marx already knew in 1857, innovation and technology together constitute the core engine of capitalism, so perhaps these skills really cannot reasonably be repurposed to change the system itself. Those of us working in the space between technology and society would need to work on re-setting the horizon of our collective imaginations around this. Bruno Latour (/ l ə ˈ t ʊər /; French: ; born 22 June 1947) is a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. Hosted by. Coronavirus et pandémie de Covid-19 ; Bruno Latour : « La crise sanitaire incite à se préparer à la mutation climatique » Tribune. You can fill in your own responses here: https://ouatterrir.medialab.sciences-po.fr/#/. I’m too old to see some kind of romantic promise in a socialist revolution. Tue 4 Feb 2020 01.00 EST. I also wonder whether my client’s previously unenthusiastic embrace of video conferencing is more about force of habit, availability of suitable technology, or perhaps a kind of nostalgia and not really something “real.”. Bruno Latour Sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher of science Participation in event(s): 18.10.2020 18th October 2020, 17:00 — 18:00. Lo más visto en EL PAÍS » Top 50. Imagining and making the future are likely one and the same — and it has to start right now. That said, Latour does not overstate the importance of his initiative. It would also leave more free time to do other things. The State of Emergency is well described by Bruno Latour: It is the state of what is rightly called statistics: population management on a territorial grid seen from above and led by the power of experts. I n the early days of the lockdown, philosopher Bruno Latour wrote an essay for the AOC cultural online newspaper. Going shopping all the time for things we only need a few times per year. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 Generic License. However, I also think we could increase the price of air travel (maybe through regulation/law?) Wherever revolutions or similar popular uprisings have occurred in recent times — Ukraine, Chile, Venezuela, the “Arab Spring,” Hong Kong, the list is long — the results are either that the prevailing capitalist system is delighted and reinvigorated (after all, it thrives on crises), or some kind of further slide into authoritarianism — or both. Jian Ghomeshi and the precarious economics of the media industry, Of bullet points, knowledge, and organizational ethnography, speculations on whether capitalism will finally end, quite possible to apply good design methodology, https://ouatterrir.medialab.sciences-po.fr/#/, Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 Generic License. “Let’s try to see if we can imagine in advance what we want to keep (...) and what we want to stop”, Latour said. This would reduce wasteful commuting further. To be clear, this would be done as a transitional model, not to “rescue” the capitalist system into an ever more insane future, but as a way to gradually enter into some kind of controlled interregnum between the present-day system and an unknown future which we cannot yet clearly imagine — and whose properties we’ve not been able to articulate (and this fact is always held against us, as if our inability to fully imagine an unknown future invalidates its possible coming-into-existence a priori). This obligatory fast, this secular and republican Ramadan can be a good opportunity for them… Covid Tracker: 26,756 cases, 234 deaths January 11, 2021; 600 rapid Covid-19 tests given on first day, same-day follow-up for positives January 11, 2021; Photo Essay: What a day of Covid-19 testing looks like January 11, 2021; Video: Data analyst gives his take on where SF erred in October as Covid-19 cases began to increase January 11, 2021 Bruno Latour : le Covid comme crash-test Puisque le virus n’a pas disparu avec le confinement, il va falloir «vivre avec». The exercise allowed me to articulate some previously disconnected ideas that had been swirling around my head in the last few weeks, and I thought the result was worth capturing separately here. As a long-term climate activist, he’s noted that the pandemic has forced us to take collective action, rather on a dime and on an unprecedented scale. “We should not miss the chance of doing something else”, said Latour, who has built himself an international reputation with his case studies of scientists, notably French biologist Louis Pasteur, and his philosophical work to show nature and society are not opposites but closely intertwined. There isn’t sufficient public transit to get me there within a “reasonable” time frame due to lack of train routes and time required. I just think that while we might win the occasional battle, we’re not really strategically advancing our overall position in the war. Designs that deliberately aim for product/service adoption first, but that then deeply resist profit-taking and appropriation by those seeking to accumulate wealth or power. He is Doctor Honoris Causa of five prominent universities (Lund, Montreal, Lausanne, Goteborg, and Warwick) and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Thinking closely in terms of medical solutions could create false public expectations of a return to normal, and risks closing out non-health interventions that could lead to substantial … https://buff.ly/3rHzhKx, “So what does the solar system sound like? It’s not just about what we can do right now (during the pandemic), but more generally: now that I can see where things should be headed, how can I contribute to that? I believe we should be working towards a new system. Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist, is the author of We Have Never Been Modern, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Facing Gaia, Down to Earth, and many other books. 382 Interested. Since January 2018 he is for two years fellow at the Zentrum fur Media Kunst (ZKM) and professor at the HfG both in Karlsruhe. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word social as used by Social Scientists has become laden with assumptions to the point where it … What follows are my responses to Mr. Latour’s writing prompts, edited for clarity and expanded where necessary. I imagine there are many professionals like myself right now who are wondering what good their skills and experiences might do to move things in a more positive direction. It has (re)structured them over our entire lifespans to be oriented towards products and services which have certain properties that respond to and amplify these desires. (all published by the MIT Press). Bruno Latour (Beaune, ... son más necesarias que nunca para ayudar a las familias y los colectivos más vulnerables por la irrupción de la covid-19. But it’s possible that this is a risk I’m more willing to explore now, since clearly we can’t go back to what was going on before. Covid-19 news: Third England lockdown could last until March; Should you avoid alcohol when getting a coronavirus vaccine? Bruno Latour (translated from French by Stephen Muecke) Perhaps it is a little inappropriate to project oneself into the post-crisis, just when the health workers are, as they say, ‘on the front line’, while millions of people lose their jobs and while many grieving families are not even able to bury their dead. Just as people around the world have been asked to adopt new behaviours to stop the spread of the virus - social distancing, wearing masks, coughing in your sleeve - Latour says all individuals should think of “protective measures” against a return to the pre-crisis production model. Capitalism, as in all things, hasn’t delivered an even distribution of internet access for all populations (even though universal access would actually create the conditions for increased overall commercial activity, but the system is too fragmented to play a long game). [12] Bruno Latour (translated from French by Stephen Muecke), “ What protective measures can you think of so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model,” AOC, March 29, 2020. From 1982 to 2006, he was a professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris and has held visiting professorships at UCSD , the London School of Economics and in the History of Science department at Harvard 3/4 What kinds of measures do you advocate so that workers/employees/ agents/entrepreneurs, who can no longer continue in the activities that you have eliminated, are able to facilitate the transition to other activities? [11] Richard Fontaine, “ Globalization will look very different after the Coronavirus Pandemic ,” Foreign Policy, April 17, 2020. As a researcher myself, I think it’s good practice. Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the social. — and initially do so in ways that focus on “high quality” experiences in the sense that we’re used to? We need to explore ways of eliminating our deeply ingrained cultural assumption that being remote is worse than “being there.” There is some interesting theoretical work on this that was done in the early 1990s in the human-computer interaction field, discussing telecommunications product design. But COVID-19 is underpinning not a wild fluctuation but an almighty crash in the heart of the form of consumerism that dominates in the most affluent countries. But what should the transition look like? It would save me money and stress if I could do most or all of my work from home. With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. Among the firsts was an essay by Bruno Latour, inviting us to address the current pandemic as a ‘dress rehearsal’ that incites us to prepare for climate change. French philosopher Bruno Latour, a life-long environmental activist, is advocating just this, inviting people to resist a return to the old ways as governments ease restrictions. It’s both a conceptual and practical problem. Bruno Latour is the recipient of the Holberg Memorial Prize for 2013 and the Siegfried Unseld Prize in 2008. If you follow me on Twitter, it’ll be no secret that in the last few years I’ve become more actively interested in politics again. This sort of change would unfortunately eliminate many retail type jobs, especially in North America, where so much of the economy is based on retail. Latour’s call echoes a study published on Tuesday in which a group of top U.S. and British economists said massive programmes of public investment targeting green issues would be the most cost-effective way to both revive economies and strike a decisive blow against climate change. Richard Horton argues that combination prevention and global health collaboration are required to address the COVID-19 pandemic.1 We agree and suggest this should incorporate further measures. Bruno Latour is now emeritus professor associated with the médialab and the program in political arts (SPEAP) of Sciences Po Paris. Its inherent dynamics are what fuels it, and their purpose is for one group to accumulate more resources than everybody else. Weltempfang The World After: Bruno Latour and Hartmut Rosa on the consequences of the coronavirus crisis Back. See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays. We could develop better ways of thinking about, and practicing, online work collaboration. Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. 4/4 What could you concretely do (alone or with others) to ensure that the activity you wish to remove (or slow down) does not resume? Share this event with your friends. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? T he philosopher Bruno Latour … His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. For good or ill, this may turn out to be one of the major legacies of the Trump era." I think we have many, many people now whose entire schooling and work experience has been about optimizing capitalist experiences for profit. I suspect that making broadband internet a regulated “utility” service will be important. Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. PARIS (Reuters) - What if rather than hurrying back to a pre-lockdown “business as usual” to revive economies hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, countries built a new normal where the fight against climate change was paramount? Traffic jams on highways and in the city. If we think of the internet as infrastructure similar to roads, electricity, water, waste removal, snow clearing etc., we realize that it should be available to everyone to facilitate equal, or at least sort-of equal, opportunities for everyone to work, communicate and experience leisure. My own work is in strategy, innovation, product management, design and technology. It would certainly be a shame to lose too quickly all the benefit of what Covid-19 has revealed to be essential. He has issued a questionnaire on his website, translated into at least a dozen languages, asking people to describe how they would like the world to evolve, what they want to be definitely dropped or what should be developed. Photograph: Robin Palmer/Alamy Stock Photo. We have known for a long time that air travel is massively wasteful and a huge contributor to the climate crisis. All quotes delayed a minimum of 15 minutes. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus … I need to commute from where I live to a client’s office approximately twice per week, 100km each way. He coedited (with Peter Weibel) the previous ZKM volumes Making Things Public, ICONOCLASH, and Reset Modernity! The lockdowns have showed “we could actually take immensely drastic measures in a matter of days to counter a threat. Advertisement. Bruno Latour forecasts the future. High rents and housing prices in cities because everyone needs to live in the city in order to be close to work. Bruno Latour. Cátedra Alfonso Reyes. Bruno Latour The unforeseen coincidence between a general confinement and the period of Lent is still quite welcome for those who have been asked, out of solidarity, to do nothing and to remain at a distance from the battle front. Cultural, economic, business “viruses,” so to speak. So I found myself typing responses which ended up being slightly more elaborate than I had originally imagined. Working remotely as standard practice would maybe put some aspects of my work at “risk” because not everyone thinks it’s 100% possible to collaborate entirely remotely. I n the summer of 1996, during an international anthropology conference in southeastern Brazil, Bruno Latour, France’s most famous and misunderstood … 28 August 2020. What never quite seemed possible in relation to our very urgent climate problems suddenly became entirely possible — despite the evident economic damage — in order to save our hides in this generation. This would deter people from traveling on a whim, or too frequently. The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. "'It's funny until it's scary': Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot" https://buff.ly/2LnKwI2, “You always think that evil is going to come from movie villain evil, and then you’re like — oh no, evil can just start with bad jokes and nihilistic behavior that is fueled by positive reinforcement on various platforms.” https://buff.ly/3nA2fsL, "As workers stay home and office buildings sit vacant, some see a new role for Midtown Manhattan's business district as a site for affordable housing." I can’t disagree with the anger and disappointment that is being expressed — I feel those too. So Latour has launched a publicity campaign (Reuters has a story with more context) and a website with four relatively simple writing prompts, asking visitors to reflect on “where to land after the pandemic.” I’m always happy to respond to surveys or be interviewed — especially when I don’t suspect that my data is being collected with ulterior motives. Never mind how seductive it may seem as an idea, I don’t think we can “inflect” capitalism and make it change from within (through ideas such as green innovation, social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, charity, finding our company’s purpose, holacracy… or whatever else people are trying). I feel less certain about international travel. France has been one of countries worst hit by COVID-19, with nearly 26,000 deaths to date. French philosopher Bruno Latour, a life-long environmental activist, is advocating just this, inviting people to resist a return to the old ways as governments ease restrictions. He said he is concerned that the scale of the crisis, which has put millions of people out of work around the world, will in fact send environmental concerns onto the back-burner. I have been trying to work “less” (fewer hours per week) for a few years now (I’m a freelance consultant). I’m thinking along the “open source” spectrum of work, but maybe a little further. The challenge, then, is to develop experiences that are as good as — or even better than — those capitalism provides so effectively. There is a difference in quality between the relationships I seek with my business clients and my family…. This seems to me to be the biggest issue today when it comes to what one might call a “leftist” or “environmentalist” imagination: the proposed solutions, of which there really aren’t very many in the first place, seem austere and not very attractive. The spiral form of endless capital accumulation is collapsing inward from one part of the world to every other. It gurgles, chatters, squeaks and flows in liquid waves of sound.” https://buff.ly/3n5TqXv. Et donc réfléchir aux liens qui nous unissent à un microbe. Like you, I’ve read enough history to know that revolutions, by and large, seem fundamentally unattractive — both as historical moments to live through (no thanks) and to actually precipitate lasting change. FILE PHOTO: French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour poses at his home during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Paris, France, May 7, 2020. So why not build new experiences that facilitate great remote work (for example), or a different kind of travel, or different kinds of energy generation/distribution, or new kinds of agriculture, etc. The link between coronavirus and climate is more direct than mere analogy, two threats that challenge our senses of scale and temporality and so seem to demand something like a state to address them. UBI is like that: we don’t consider it seriously while the economy is in “good” shape (and we could therefore afford to start it), and when things go badly, we say we can’t afford to think about it. 1/4 What are the suspended activities and behaviors that you would like to see not coming back? We used to have to “think harder” about how frequently we traveled, and planned for it differently. Bruno Latour is among the most important figures in contemporary philosophy and social science. Bruno Latour is Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, and the 2013 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize. It whistles and it whoops. So I have to drive. His ethnographic studies have revolutionized our understanding of areas as diverse as science, law, politics and religion. Generally, the objective of “activism” and/or “innovation” in this space should probably be to develop “new normals” and field-test them to see if, in time, they begin to no longer feel like “less than” what we used to have. Latour, 72, says the pandemic has unexpectedly showed it is possible to shut down global economic activity, despite leaders saying for decades that the train of progress could not be stopped. And I think the Covid-19 crisis may have woken up some of them to the possibility that they need to re-deploy their knowledge and skills. However, unfortunately, I live in Canada and my closest relatives in Germany and Australia, respectively. Share. 2/4 Starting from an activity or behavior that touches you personally, describe why this activity seems to you to be noxious/superfluous/ dangerous/incoherent in the framework of your own life or in the life of others. International trips were “events,” you went for a longer time and might visit a place only once in your lifetime. Measures would need to be explored to deal with that. It crackles and it chirps. One way is to stop buying the things we don’t want. But at the same time, crises typically only amplify and accelerate trends that were already underway, and journalists have certainly let their imaginations run wild with what will (need to) change, speculations on whether capitalism will finally end, and so on. Trending Latest Video Free. Explore my blog's themes on the About this blog page. Bruno Latour is a distinguished philosopher and an anthropologist. Bruno Latour. In the midst of the chaos, of the... Posted: June 7, 2020 Virtual opening of the exhibition: Critical Zones Observatories for Earthly Politics May 22nd ... All content copyright Bruno Latour 2011 unless otherwise noted; I have to get up very early, it takes a long time to get there, and Covid-19 has proven without a doubt that everyone can actually work from home using video conferencing and other ways of collaborating remotely (it’s white collar work). Universal basic income makes sense in theory, of course, but always fails in practice — it’s similar to how consumers think about insurance: you never think you need it until something catastrophic happens.