On technology, art, education. Towards a practical guide for avoiding the upcoming societal collapse
On December 11th 1 pm NY, 6 pm UK time we will host a hybrid online/offline meeting to discuss educational, artistic, and technological ideas: the creation of a Survival Kit Collection. If you would like to participate, email us at info@davidgraeber.org or info@davidgraeber.institute to get the Zoom invitation.
In the days prior, we will be at the St Vincent prison facilities, where we will be installing a 3D printer and a spirulina production kit. We will also host a dinner with inmates, prison administration, and DGI members and friends, sharing spirulina pasta and other spirulina-based dishes we will bring with us.
What we hope to explore together is the possibility of creating a shared space where technology, art, and education—especially anthropology—can come together to form what David Graeber called poetic technologies.
Why is this important?
Because we still live in a world where technologies are treated as autonomous forces that automatically drive progress and reshape society. This is what capitalism claims—and what we want to challenge.
Yet what we actually see is something different: despite the astonishing technical achievements humanity has accomplished in recent years, the world is not developing “forward” from capitalism toward luxury communism or a Star Trek-like society of abundance, but rather sliding back toward new forms of techno-feudalism.
So what is happening, and how can we intervene, if at all? Amidst ever growing ecological, political and social precarity, where may we learn about resilience that is not occurring at the cost of exploiting the other?
David Graeber described technology as social relationships. Perhaps this is exactly that common ground on which we can all meet to attempt changing the world for the better?
Image Detail from Poem by Sangi no Takamura (Ono no Takamura), a woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1835 sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / The Metropolitan Museum