Anthropocene

simply be to amplify their voices, with everything we have.

Experimental humanities labs and DH makerspaces participate in this forward-facing reorientation, allowing scholars to tinker and build, bringing critical perspectives to the realms of 3d fabrication; do-it-yourself wearable and embedded computing; hardware hacking, modding, and repair, augmented reality, and the making of bots and games

Mapping, code, and data collection’, she writes, ‘must be allied to a sense of memory’

then DH has a public and transformative role to play.

DH accomplishments look magical

that explains all our human striving toward a label for the Anthropocene

This project supports the genetic engineering of endangered species (altering them physically to become more resilient in the Anthropocene) and the cloning and wholesale re-creation of extinct ones—passenger pigeons, wooly mammoths—work that founder Stewart Brand promotes as ‘genetic rescue’

‘science has no mourning rituals,

show how comfortably the concept of resilience—of bouncing back, of being flexible and adaptable as a measure not just of ecological fitness, but of a kind of ‘moral worthiness’—has aligned with ‘the ideals of neoliberalism:’ constant volatility, strategic dynamism, deregulation, and the consequent ‘dismantling of environmental and social welfare programs’ (O’Brien, 2013, p. 5). Today, we seek resilient cities, resilient infrastructure, resilient employees. It’s a seductive term.

when he tells us that hope lies in putting as much care into the stewardship of our disquieting tech as we put into its creation—

drop all pretense about the perfectibility of our technologies and our capacity to stave off disaster, and instead use their craft to help audiences come to terms with the ‘unraveling … of the world’

‘What comes after the end of the world?’

ed a puckishly provocative optimism in everything they do

In fact, members of the Long Now would have me say that it was founded in the year 01996, a way of writing dates that presently accommodates a further 97,985 years. To put this into perspective—50,000 years before the Long Now runs out of digits, Niagara Falls will have eroded its remaining 32 kilometers to Lake Erie

‘Perhaps the most difficult, and at the same time the most interesting, problem that arises … is the relation between Man's psychology and his geological activities. His most profound interferences with Nature have their origin in his thoughts’

The Earth as Modified by Human Action

One point of disagreement and discussion rests in where, exactly, far-future geologists and alien paleontologists might drive the Anthropocenic delimiter—a marker that, for rockhounds of our day, is a literal ‘Golden Spike’.3 Will they detect the startling isotopic signature of 20th century atomic bombs, evident in all our teeth and bones? Will they note chemical and mineral traces—acid and soot—or coal miners’ physical perturbations of the earth dating to the Industrial Revolution? Or will the Anthropocene begin in the microscopic fossil record of the spread of agriculture, some 8–100,000 years ago? Who knows? It’s all the blink of an eye, and we’ll be long gone.

In fact, an alternate form of the word—Anthropocene—coined by the biologist Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s, won out, having been popularized through the early 2000s by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen

Can DH develop a practical ethics of resilience and repair? Can it become more humane while working at inhuman scales? Can we resist narratives of progress, and still progress?

Can it speak to us as technologists, developers, and specialists in method and form; as researchers, administrators, students, and shapers and makers of all kinds?

Does it reflect the managerial and problem-solving character of our 21st-century institutions? Is it about preservation, conservation, and recovery—or about understanding ephemerality and embracing change? Does our work help us to appreciate, memorialize, and mourn the things we’ve lost?

we live at the cusp of a mass extinction.