A new, updated edition of the 1979 classic from one of the foremost authors in cognitive science and theoretical biology, with the original text as well as more than 200 citations to current scientific developments. Francisco Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy was a groundbreaking text when it was first published in 1979, putting forth a novel theory of how living systems produce and maintain themselves. This new edition, edited and annotated by cognitive scientists Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson—revised and complemented with introductory essays for each part of the book—contains a wealth of ideas relevant to current projects in theoretical biology, cognitive science, systems theory, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology. Over 220 margin annotations supplement the reading of the text, linking to subsequent research and broader contemporary debates. This foundational book introduces the key concept of autonomy derived as an elaboration of the idea of autopoiesis (the self-production and self-distinction) of living organisms. Varela covers topics in systems theory, neuroscience, theories of perception, and immune networks and offers a participatory epistemology that goes on to be further developed in later enactive literature. These ideas are compelling not only for historical reasons but also because they still illuminate current efforts in developing the enactive approach toward wider and more challenging goals (including language, human cognition, ethics, and environmentalism).

A theory of justice for AI models making decisions about employment, lending, education, criminal justice, and other important social goods. Decisions about important social goods like education, employment, housing, loans, health care, and criminal justice are all becoming increasingly automated with the help of AI. But because AI models are trained on data with historical inequalities, they often produce unequal outcomes for members of disadvantaged groups. In AI Fairness, Derek Leben draws on traditional philosophical theories of fairness to develop a framework for evaluating AI models, which can be called a theory of algorithmic justice—a theory inspired by the theory of justice developed by the American philosopher John Rawls. For several years now, researchers who design AI models have investigated the causes of inequalities in AI decisions and proposed techniques for mitigating them. It turns out that in most realistic conditions it is impossible to comply with all metrics simultaneously. Because of this, companies using AI systems will have to choose which metric they think is the correct measure of fairness, and regulators will need to determine how to apply currently existing laws to AI systems. Leben provides a detailed set of practical recommendations for companies looking to evaluate their AI systems and regulators thinking about laws around AI systems, and he offers an honest analysis of the costs of implementing fairness in AI systems—as well as when these costs may or may not be acceptable.

A landmark cultural history that reveals how the relentless pursuit of innovation has transformed our society, our institutions, and our inner selves. For half a century, innovation served as a universal good in an age of fracture. That consensus is cracking. While the imperative to innovate for a better future continues to fuel systemic change around the world, critics now assail innovation culture as an engine of inequality or accuse its do-gooders of woke groupthink. What happened? Drawing on a decade of research, Every American an Innovator by Matthew Wisnioski investigates how innovation—a once obscure academic term—became ingrained in our institutions, our education, and our beliefs about ourselves. Wisnioski argues that innovation culture did not spring from the digital revolution, nor can it be boiled down to heroic entrepreneurs or villainous capitalists. Instead, he reveals the central role of a new class of experts in spreading toolkits and mindsets from the cornfields of 1940s Iowa to Silicon Valley tech giants today. This group of engineers, philosophers, bureaucrats, and business leaders posited that “innovators” were society’s most important change agents and remade the nation in their image. The innovation culture they built transcended partisan divisions and made strange bedfellows. Wisnioski shows how Kennedy-era policymakers inspired President Nixon’s dream of a Nobel Prize for innovators, how anti-military professors built the first university incubators for entrepreneurs, how radical feminists became millionaire consultants, how demands for a rust belt manufacturing renaissance inspired theories of a global creative class, how programs that encouraged girls and minority children to pursue innovative lives changed the nature of childhood play, and why the innovation consensus is now in dispute.

From a leading ethicist, a workable and inspiring model of ethics, showing not only why ethics matters but also how it can be used to improve human welfare. Humanity faces a multitude of profound challenges at present: technological advances, environmental changes, rising inequality, and deep social and political pluralism. These transformations raise moral questions—questions about how we view ourselves and how we ought to engage with the world in the pursuit of human flourishing. In The Theory of Deliberative Wisdom , Eric Racine puts forward an original interdisciplinary ethics theory that offers both an explanation of the workings of human morality and a model for deliberation-based imaginative processes to tackle moral problems. Drawing from a wide array of disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, neuroscience, and economics, this book offers an engaging account of situated moral agency and of ethical life as the pursuit of human flourishing. Moral experience, Racine explains, is accounted for in the form of situational units—morally problematic situations. These units are, in turn, theorized as actionable and participatory building blocks of moral existence mapping to mechanisms of episodic memory and to the construction of personal identity. Such explanations pave the way for an understanding of the social and psychological mechanisms of the awareness and neglect of morally problematic situations as well as of the imaginative ethical deliberation needed to respond to these situations. Deliberative wisdom is explained as an engaged and ongoing learning process about human flourishing.

A compelling proposal for new international law and institutions to address the planetary crisis that improves biodiversity protection, supports Indigenous peoples, and prevents catastrophic climate change. In The Ecology Politic , Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel contend that the roots of our planetary crisis lie in the modern state: in its destructive entanglement with capitalism and its colonial legacies of extraction and oppression. This, in turn, has shaped global governance and international law, as they continue to fail to curb global heating, deforestation, and extinction. In a far-reaching critique of the foundational political theory of the modern state—the body politic—the authors insist that nothing less than a radically different model of the polity—an ecology politic—is needed if we are to escape this impasse. Burke and Fishel argue that the international rule of law enacts a sovereign ban of nature that appropriates nonhuman lives for profit and use while denying them political and legal standing. We fail because we rely on the very institutions, worldviews, and systems that generated the crisis to solve it. The authors reconsider political power, agency, scale, and democracy in the Anthropocene and assert a biospheric ethic that values the entangled planetary structure of matter, energy, and life. Further, they argue for more-than-human beings to be represented in an ecological democracy that flows across borders. In short, they imagine a polity whose fundamental purpose is to protect planetary ecosystems and nurture interlocking systems of social and ecological justice.

How everyday wetness—from finger smudges, sweat, and spilled drinks to showering and swimming—collides with consumers' media devices designed to stay dry. License to Spill investigates the everyday moments, activities, and spaces where media technologies and liquids collide—from disastrous spilled drinks that corrode laptops and drops in the toilet that drown smartphones to the greasy finger smudges and sweat droplets that sully screens and glitch smartwatches. Putting historical and present-day case studies in conversation, Rachel Plotnick considers how people’s experiences with media devices inevitably encounter wetness and yet consumers—not the companies who make the devices—take the blame when leaks, spillages, and overflows occur. Along with thinking about preventive measures and device caretaking, License to Spill examines how water-resistant and waterproofed technologies, through their design and marketing, imagine the brawniest and hardiest of users meant to “punish” and “abuse” their “tough” devices, granting them unfettered permission to get wet. Examining a long history of “torture testing” and hyperbolic claims of imperviousness, the book demonstrates how protective designs relate to broader cultural ideas about media use as sporty, luxurious, excessive, or messy. This context is especially relevant given that the market for water-resistant bags, cases, coatings, and seals has flourished over the past decade, with new rhetoric about wetness as “natural” and digital technologies as ever-present. The book pushes us to attend to both the ideals and problems that arise when designing “resilient” devices, ranging from the “right to repair” movement and lawsuits over ingress protection (IP) ratings to obsolescence culture and work-from-home activities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

An original essay collection that explores the generative dimensions of fragility, which can help reveal new life-affirming politics and ethics. At a time when it may be easy to fall into a defeatist melancholia, if not outright pessimism, fragility offers an opportunity for a different kind of world-making. In Fragilities , Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Jérôme Denis, and David Pontille argue that we need to pay attention to the moments when the bodies, things, and worlds we inhabit begin to crack and reveal their fragility; it is in these instabilities that we can gain precious access to alternative ways of being. The essays in this collection explore how the work of care, maintenance, and repair compose with, rather than struggle against, fragilities. Fragility forces us to reckon with the precariousness and contingency of life and to use this reckoning as a starting point to build and nurture life-affirming politics and ethics. The book explores fragility in four categories—bodies, environments, labor, and politics—and proposes to consider in each situation what/who is rendered visible, what/who is made absent, what is considered normal, and what is deemed strong and stable versus what is deemed fragile. The volume includes a strong line-up of leading and emerging scholars from a wide array of disciplines, including anthropology, social studies of science, disabilities studies, and sociology.

How we can work together to understand, imagine, and build humane infrastructures and a better world. Humane Infrastructures is a deep journey into humanistic and humane knowledge and how it can be engaged to help us collaboratively respond in ethical and sustainable ways to our current global challenges. Patrik Svensson takes the reader through a series of examples, case studies, experiments, and lively dialogues to reconsider infrastructure. He brings people, ideas, and perspectives in through a set of documents and documented experiences, some of which draw from the author’s practice in Umeå, Stockholm, New York City, and Los Angeles. And he proposes frameworks, such as the idea of an infrastructure clinic, exploring them in staged dialogues and thought experiments. Imagining and building humane infrastructures require us to challenge the very nature of infrastructure, not necessarily all at once but rather step by step. The author consequently engages with infrastructure as a concept and frames it historically, critically, and creatively with research infrastructure as a central case study. He also considers integrative niches for humanities-related work, such as environmental humanities and disability studies, as sites for critical and constructive engagement with infrastructures, including the university itself. In the end, the exploration leads to a reimagination of the humanities and, more generally, higher education as part of a capacious public-facing effort of world-(re)building. The book will appeal to scholars in the humanities and a range of intersecting fields, such as infrastructure studies, critical computing, and design.

An interdisciplinary exploration of annotation that shows how this participatory act marks public memory, struggles for justice, and social change. Annotation—the seemingly simple act of marking a text—is often diminished as a marginal practice. It is prohibited in physical objects and considered irrelevant to social and political concerns. But what if annotation were reimagined as a critical and civic literacy that can inscribe public memory, struggles for justice, and social change? In Re/Marks on Power , education researcher Remi Kalir argues that enduring traces of annotation can be read and (re)written to advance counternarratives and more just social futures. Kalir's interdisciplinary approach examines annotation in archives and libraries, on walls and in books, atop maps and monuments, and along byways and all manner of margins to describe the relevance of “re/marks.” With a series of vivid and wide-ranging cases, Kalir describes how groups of annotators make public re/marks of resistance and creativity, often with simple tools and accessible methods. These annotations alter familiar texts, oppose hateful ideology, and broadcast solidarity and social activism. Among the book's fresh reads of annotation are considerations of how Harriet Tubman's legacy is remembered and honored, how the US-Mexico border was defined and is restoried, how problematic public monuments are contested and reimagined, and how books featuring LGBTQIA+ topics are classified, censored, and celebrated. Re/Marks on Power honors the actions of annotators, whether eminent or anonymous, and highlights how material traces have mediated justice-oriented possibility. Throughout this book, the author makes visible a new social language of annotation that can be read across time and texts.

A robust yet accessible introduction to the idea, history, and key applications of differential privacy—the gold standard of algorithmic privacy protection. Differential privacy (DP) is an increasingly popular, though controversial, approach to protecting personal data. DP protects confidential data by introducing carefully calibrated random numbers, called statistical noise, when the data is used. Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all integrated the technology into their software, and the US Census Bureau used DP to protect data collected in the 2020 census. In this book, Simson Garfinkel presents the underlying ideas of DP, and helps explain why DP is needed in today's information-rich environment, why it was used as the privacy protection mechanism for the 2020 census, and why it is so controversial in some communities. When DP is used to protect confidential data, like an advertising profile based on the web pages you have viewed with a web browser, the noise makes it impossible for someone to take that profile and reverse engineer, with absolute certainty, the underlying confidential data on which the profile was computed. The book also chronicles the history of DP and describes the key participants and its limitations. Along the way, it also presents a short history of the US Census and other approaches for data protection such as de-identification and k-anonymity.

The first critical account of the enormous upsurge in cultural expression across Asian countries from 1979–2008, and the new possibilities it presented for the aesthetic and cultural re-imagining of a “unified” contemporary Asia. Biennial-style art exhibitions. New discourses in modern and contemporary art. The production and circulation of increasingly debordered popular culture. A Regional Contemporary by C. J. W.-L. Wee is an investigative account of the dramatic increase in cultural expression in Asia from 1979 to 2008, with the 1990s as the focal point of this period. The so-called East Asian miracle, Wee argues, projected a fictive but shared contemporary regional identity onto Northeast and Southeast Asia, collectively taken as East Asia. The new cultural explosion was notably enabled by expanded capitalist energies that reached a level critical enough to reposition the region's postcolonial and Cold War–era nationalisms, and this book examines the resulting implications. A sophisticated and compelling study, A Regional Contemporary is the first to examine the conjunction of high and popular culture in the region. Moreover, Wee reveals how the various cultural formations of this regional contemporary were able to traverse—if not overcome—uneven national economies, the memory of Japanese empire, and the geopolitical rifts of post–Cold War nationalisms. While foregrounding new cultural expression, Wee simultaneously examines how novel economic conditions bolstered a more confident questioning of Western modernity's dominance and enhanced the capacity for regional dialogue in the bid to overcome colonial-era legacies—even as those legacies were being absorbed into the region.

A novel account of the explanatory role of representation in both the cognitive sciences and commonsense practice that preserves the virtues without the defects of the prevailing two views about mental representation. Philosophers of mind tend to hold one of two broad views about mental representation: they are either robustly realist about mental representations, taking them to have determinate, objective content independent of attributors' explanatory interests and goals, or they embrace some form of anti-realism, holding that mental representations are at best useful fictions. Neither view is satisfactory. In Deflating Mental Representation , Frances Egan develops and defends a distinctive third way—a view she calls a deflationary account of mental representation—that both resolves philosophical worries about content and best fits actual practice in science and everyday life. According to Egan's deflationary account, appeal to mental representation does indeed pick out causes of behavior, but the attribution of content to these causes is best understood as a pragmatically motivated gloss , justified in part by attributors' explanatory interests and goals. Content plays an explanatory role in the deflationary account, but one quite different than that assumed by robust representational realists. Egan also develops a novel account of perceptual experience as a kind of modeling of our inner lives by aspects of external reality and explains the role of appeal to representation in this process.

How scientific studies of human behavior can be replicated with the consistency and rigor characteristic of the physical sciences, yielding scientific “laws.” In Laws of Human Behavior , Donald Pfaff and Sandra Sherman argue that many behavioral and neural discoveries—verified over the years through precise, reliable measurement—are tantamount to “laws,” comparable in rigor and replicability to physical laws such as gravity and the second law of thermodynamics. Drawing on research in areas including psychophysics, various types of conditioning and habit formation, and even social behaviors, they show how important aspects of the behavioral sciences contribute to laws that should be celebrated now. Responding to what some commentators have called a crisis in reliability, the authors make a compelling case for the progress that experimental work in areas, formerly labeled as “soft” science, has achieved. The book is international in scope. References range from the early nineteenth-century work of Weber to papers published in 2023. In particular, the authors cite important accomplishments in the behavioral and neural sciences of the past few decades that support the characterization of these sciences as “exact.” Each chapter of the book has three parts: examples of the law's manifestations in everyday life, examples of the laboratory science that supports the law, and neurobiological results that further support the validity of the law. The book also offers clues for understanding where the field of behavioral science is headed. The authors intend for the book to be accessible to interested nonscientists.

An edited collection that explores the multifaceted experiences of Chinese culinary modernity both within and outside of mainland China from the mid-19th century to present. Modern Chinese Foodways defines some of the major processes by which Chinese food and foodways have become modern, with a focus on the period from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The editors, Jia-Chen Fu, Michelle T. King, and Jakob A. Klein, highlight four prominent areas of change: commodification of food production; the scientization of expertise and the development of new food technologies; the creation of new culinary identities based on gender, ethnicity, and nation; and the circuits of migration taking place since the nineteenth century. This collection argues that Chinese food and foodways are very much modern—not a given in the face of the chorus of voices that insists on emphasizing its ancient roots—in ways that both recall the experiences of other cultures, as well as in ways unique to China's own historical trajectory. The book combines incisive, original scholarship by thirteen leading voices in the field with editorial essays on the past and future of Chinese food studies to frame the field of inquiry for the next generation of Chinese food studies scholars. Demonstrating the significance of modern Chinese foodways to the phenomenon of culinary modernity writ large, which is still largely shaped by Euro-American perspectives and priorities, Modern Chinese Foodways is the first book of its kind.

A new perspective on the spatial complexity and plurality of Japanese videogames. Unboxing Japanese Videogames uncovers the complex and plural spatialities of commercial videogames published in Japan between 1985 and 2015. Rejecting the “boxing” inherent in the phrase “Japanese videogames,” Martin Roth explores a series of spatialities that unfold in videogame production and distribution. The book develops a notion of spatialization that is applied in the analysis of contents or genre distributions in Japan, the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the distribution of videogame works across different important markets, the geography of actors involved in videogame production and their gradual spatialization over time, and the functional spatialization of game production across a diverse range of platforms. This book is the first English-language study to provide an overview of the subject and also the first to explore the spatial history of FromSoftware games. It stands out because it does so quantitatively, offering a macro-perspective on the field of commercial videogames instead of relying on sales statistics or case studies. In addition to a wide range of related scholarship in English, the book engages actively with scholarship and other relevant resources in Japanese. Over thirty visualizations make the findings of the book tangible and invite the reader to explore the spatial complexity of commercial videogames further.

What makes human cognition distinct from animal and artificial forms of intelligence—and how analogies play a crucial role in our unique abilities. In The Human Edge , cognitive scientist, poet, and translator Keith Holyoak takes a fresh look at what makes human intelligence special. His focus is analogy—the ability to see relational similarities between things that on the surface seem unalike. The book brings together a half century of research in cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology, coupled with work in philosophy, law, education, linguistics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Rather than simply examining analogy as an isolated human ability, Holyoak places it in the broader context of a trinity of special human capacities—analogy, language, and understanding the minds of other people. Each of these capacities relies on distinct neural circuitry in the human brain. Holyoak analyzes the similarities—and critical differences—between cognition in humans and in other intelligent animals, ranging from crows to chimpanzees. He also traces how relational thinking develops in children, emphasizing the distinctive advances that begin at about age three. Along the way, Holyoak paints a broad picture of how people use analogy in everyday life—to make jokes, to argue, to teach, to make moral judgments. He considers when an analogy counts as rational evidence—for or against a scientific hypothesis, or the judgment in a legal case. He also evaluates the most recent advances in artificial intelligence that have started to achieve complex tasks previously limited to humans while highlighting the distinctive aspects of human creativity. In a time of rapid technological change, with ominous portents for society, this book provides a timely reexamination of what really counts as the human edge.

How technology creates new possibilities for transgender people, and how trans experiences, in turn, create new possibilities for technology. Mainstream technologies often exclude or marginalize transgender users. Trans Technologies describes what happens when trans people take technology design into their own hands. Oliver L. Haimson, whose research into gender transition and technology has defined this area of study, draws on transgender studies and his own in-depth interviews with more than 100 creators of technology—including apps, games, health resources, extended reality systems, and supplies designed to address challenges trans people face—to explain what trans technology is and to explore its present possibilities and limitations, as well as its future prospects. Haimson surveys the landscape of trans technologies to reveal the design processes that brought these technologies to life, and to show how trans people often must rely on community, technology, and the combination of the two to meet their basic needs and challenges. His work not only identifies the role of trans technology in caring for individuals within the trans community but also shows how trans technology creation empowers some trans people to create their own tools for navigating the world. Articulating which trans needs and challenges are currently being addressed by technology and which still need to be addressed; describing how trans technology creators are accomplishing this work; examining how privilege, race, and access to resources impact which trans technologies are built and who may be left out; and highlighting new areas of innovation to be explored, Trans Technologies opens the way to meaningful social change.

How the built environment, understood as spatial capital, governs both everyday life in cities and urban systems more generally. In an age of social and environmental crises, we need to critically rethink the role of the built environment and how best to put it to work. Measures and Meanings of Spatial Capital presents a new theory of spatial capital, arguing that spatial form is essential for building resilience into highly complex urban systems. Lars Marcus argues that the built environment constitutes a form of capital that enhances other forms of capital in cities (such as social, economic, and ecological capital), if designed with those goals in mind. This represents an important and necessary shift in how we approach urban space in the numerous studies of cities that are conducted in a range of disciplines today, such as urban sociology, urban economics, and urban ecology. In contemporary urban studies, land has oddly lost its position alongside labor and capital as one of the three fundamental production factors in economic theory, but as Marcus shows, misconceptions of land are at the root of social and environmental crises worldwide. By defining the challenges and modeling our use of spatial form to enhance/improve land, and then synthesizing data into a unified theory of spatial capital, Marcus provides a crucial reframing of how we can best plan and design our cities for the global challenges we are facing.

An in-depth investigation of the Twitch streamers who make up the largest population on the platform: those streaming to small audiences or even no one. The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us , Mia Consalvo, Marc Lajeunesse, and Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are not in it for the money and barely have an audience. In this, the first book dedicated to the latter group, the authors gather interviews from dozens of microstreamers from 2017 to 2019 to discuss their lives, struggles, hopes, and goals. For readers interested in livestreaming, and Twitch in particular, the book rethinks the medium's history through accounts of the everyday uses of webcams, with particular attention to notions of liveness and authenticity. These two concepts have become calling cards for the videogame livestreaming platform and underlie streamer motivations, the construction of their practices (whether casual, serious, or anywhere in between), and the complex “metas” that take shape over time. The book also looks at the authors' own practices of livestreaming, focusing on what can be gained through experiencing the lived reality of the practice. Finally, the authors explain how Twitch's platform (studied from 2017–2023) informs how streamers structure their every day and how corporate ideologies bleed into real-world spaces like TwitchCon.