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5. Essays in Exploration: Resisting Reduction
These essays were finalist selections in the 2018 Resisting Reduction essay competition and are in conversation with Joi Ito’s manifesto by the same name. As essays are published, readers are encouraged to share and engage with each article and the ideas put forward by their authors.
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Published: Apr 25, 2019
If we want to resist reduction in practice, it’s worth revisiting movements that reacted to previous cultural shifts, Romantic history in particular. How it succeeded—and failed—can show how to achieve real change while avoiding the most dangerous consequences.
Published: Apr 22, 2019
The first computing machines were so large they filled entire rooms. Today they are ubiquitous, built invisibly into our environments. While it's tempting to view this change within a predetermined space of progress, we can still shape the future on our own terms.
Published: Apr 11, 2019
How games and game engines can provide new ways of comprehending networked and distributed forms of intelligence.
Published: Apr 07, 2019
Are institutions, through compartmentalization, a root cause of the exploitation and reduction that spans relations from gender to ecology? A new language—and a new sense-making—to address the horrors of this exploitation.
Published: Mar 28, 2019
Dominant paradigms of ecology reduce life into "parts," failing to articulate the symbiosis of such communities, or of organisms as intricately nested collectives. To understand organisms, we must use the language of symbiotic ecology.
Published: Mar 21, 2019
In a world of total automation and artificial intelligence, what is the role of the human? Mining the history of perfect thinking to better understand its intellectual foundations in the present.
Published: Mar 14, 2019
Can we design ourselves out of the human-centered practices that have for years dominated the field of design, in turn developing a more inclusive, multi-perspective design approach that utilizes xeno discourses and conceptual design?
Published: Mar 07, 2019
Current models of game‐playing AI reduce the complexity of the playing scenario, suffusing research with the zero-sum-based language of goals and competition. Through Play, we can resist this myopic orientation of goals in favor of a more creative model and vocabulary.
Published: Mar 01, 2019
At their earliest years, children are able to master some of the most complex motor tasks, through intuitive/playful engagement with the world. Does the control-oriented approach to child rearing - when the adult inevitably intervenes - normalize the reductionism we're to resist?
Published: Feb 19, 2019
Exploring how the coming together of a new materialist approach to education with the experimental practices of artists and designers can open up expansive possibilities for children’s creative learning.
Published: Feb 19, 2019
A transdisciplinary discussion of artificial intelligence, biomimicry, data science, and software engineering research. Can we frame the development of evolutionary intelligence in these terms?
Published: Feb 07, 2019
Decentralization is the process of dispersing power away from a central authority. It has never been possible on a global scale—until now. But can it foster abundance without excess, multiplicity without superfluity, and complexity without chaos?
Published: Jan 22, 2019
Today too many people are still deprived of basic amenities such as medicine, while current patent laws continue to convolute and impede innovation. But if allowed, AI can provide an opportunity to redefine this paradigm and be the catalyst for change—if.
Published: Jan 24, 2019
Techno-optimists on the vanguard of the so-called Singularity have given rise to a seductive machine: a networked society optimized for exponential growth. How do we manifest alternatives to reductive aggregation?
Published: Jan 17, 2019
Resisting reduction as a concept is inherently about the experience of being human. What is it to be human in the modern world? Are all reductions of this experience to be resisted? If not, which parts of the human experience would we want to reduce, or enhance?
Published: Jan 10, 2019
Silicon Valley conveys a monolithic reliance on exponential presumptions of AI, resulting in Singularity. Consequently, as a collaborative system, does it promote herd behavior in favor of reductionism?
