FCJ-135 Feral Computing: From Ubiquitous Calculation to Wild Interactions

In ‘The Coming Age of Calm Technology’, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown are clear in their assertions, what really ‘matters’ about technology is not technology in itself, rather, its capacity to continuously recreate our relationship with the world at large (Brown and Weiser 1996). Even though they promote such an idea under the banner of ‘calm technology’, what is central to their thesis is the mutational capacities brought into the world by the spillage of computation out from its customary boxes. What their work tends to occlude is that in setting the sinking of technology almost imperceptibly, but deeply into the ‘everyday’ as a target for ubiquitous computing, other possibilities are masked, for instance, those of greater hackability or interrogability of such technologies. Our contention is that making ubicomp seamless (MacColl et al, 2002) tends to obfuscate the potential of computation in reworking computational subjects, including societies, modes of life, and inter-relations with the dynamics of thought and the composition of experience and understanding.