Notes
Notes
Brief notes, working ideas and observations in progress.
NotesDigital violence is not a design flaw
From synthetic images created in a school to the automatic reuse of photographs on Instagram. An anthropological account of how platforms and institutions distribute harm and the work of repair.
Visual anthropology and AICinema ParAIso
Artificial intelligence is reshaping audiovisual production, but the debate is not only about generated images. It affects labour, archives, languages, rights, representation and the power to decide which stories circulate.
Political anthropologyThe Besieged People
How populism turns distrust into an infrastructure of power across platforms, AI, and democratic life.
Political anthropology and AIThe Platform and the Category
Palantir, Carissa Véliz and the struggle over who defines what is visible, urgent and disposable
Economic anthropologyThe Third Obligation: Accra and the Debt the West Refuses to Repay
The Accra summit turns resolution A/RES/80/250 into an institutional agenda. This note asks whether recognising historical harm also entails restitution and examines how that question reappears in the political economy of AI.
Anthropology of work and AIThe gesture as data
From Meta to Gurugram, how clicks, skills and bodily techniques are turned into data to train automation.
Indigenous thought and decolonisationFour ways of remapping Abya Yala
A note on Ollantay Itzamná, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Gladys Tzul Tzul, read from Abya Yala and against the colonial map, including the one now learned by artificial intelligence.
Economic anthropology and AIThe company that acts alone does not exist
Palantir imagines an armed technological republic, the United States restricts Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as strategic capabilities and Milei proposes non-human corporations. Algorithmic autonomy appears as a political fiction that hides people, data, territory, labour and life.
Anthropology and developmentAyiti: Trouillot, AI and a single finite world
A note on Haiti, international aid and the political economy of artificial intelligence, read through Michel-Rolph Trouillot, colonial memory and human kinship.
AI governance and ethicsNot too late again: AI, data and public ethics
The opening in Valencia of the UN's AI Governance Lab, read through anthropology: data, consent, algorithmic harm and public ethics.
Social doctrine and AILeo XIV, artificial intelligence and the new human question
An anthropological reading of Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Leo XIV on artificial intelligence, human dignity and technological power.
Technology and current affairsA revolution (in this too): weather forecasting
A note on Aardvark Weather and the impact of artificial intelligence on weather forecasting.
Digital archaeologyAI and archaeology: revolutionary discoveries in Nazca
A note on the use of deep learning to identify new geoglyphs in the Nazca region.