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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from The Ministry for the Future
  • Today we're here to inquire who actually enacts the world's economy—who are the ones who make it all go, so to speak....[goes on to suggest and consider a bunch of different types of people: lawyers, police, stock markets, academics, bureaucrats].... Also I suppose simply prices themeselves, and interest rates and the like. Which is to say simply the system itself. You were asking about the people doing it. Yes, but it's an actor network. Some of the actors in an actor network aren't human. Balderdash. What, you don't believe in actor networks? There are actor networks, but it's the actors with agency who can choose to do things differently.
    • p59-60

actor network

30 Oct 2021 - 17 Jun 2023
Open in Logseq
    • Aka ANT
    • See Bruno Latour and Actor–network theory - Wikipedia. Of interest since it's a well-established alternative framework for thinking about agency – in that the actors it identifies are not necessarily human, but could be (eg) machines, institutions, animals, or even non-animate natural objects like
    • Bears some relationship to the influential Actor model of computation developed by Carl Hewitt, although not sure exactly what that relationship was.
    • Although it is best known for its controversial insistence on the capacity of nonhumans to act or participate in systems or networks or both, ANT is also associated with forceful critiques of conventional and critical sociology. Developed by science and technology studies (STS) scholars Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, the sociologist John Law, and others, it can more technically be described as a "material-semiotic" method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic.
      • – Wikipedia