Daily radar
Daily radar
A curated selection of readings and debates at the intersection of artificial intelligence and anthropology.
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Remembering, knowing, finding — when machines need to make the human legible
Three signals on conversational memory, expert work and cultural discoverability show how AI is turning human practices into computational infrastructure.
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When AI needs land
Automatic control, data centres and local media show that artificial intelligence does not live in the cloud. It depends on physical infrastructure, public resources and content over which bargaining power is distributed very unevenly.
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Relationships, learning, judgement
Three places where AI stops being merely a tool
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Landscape, truth and a mediated world
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Sherry B. Ortner and Tim Ingold invite us to reverse a familiar question about AI: not only what a technology does, but what relations it needs and what kind of world it helps to produce.
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Manufacturing the source to manufacture the answer
Propaganda has always needed to look like something else. What is new is that it must now also look like knowledge to a machine.
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Palantir and the Digital Twin That Does Not Yet Exist
In 2017, Argentine state agencies explored Palantir tools in connection with the archives of the AMIA case. In 2022, the company registered its trademark in Argentina. Three years later, Próspera co-founder Gabriel Delgado Ayau held a nearly two-hour meeting at the Casa Rosada. In 2026, Thiel Macro disclosed a position worth almost $76 million in Vista Energy, while the government announced a Social Digital Twin that, months later, it acknowledged was not even in the design stage.
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Sweden · When the infrequent disappears from the model
Synthetic data do not simply reproduce the world. By determining which cases and relations survive generation, they can turn the majority into normality and make the infrequent disappear.
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What we delegate when we delegate to the machine
Three scenes in China, Mexico and Sweden show that delegating to AI no longer means only automating tasks: it also reaches into relationships, the organisation of knowledge and the ways the world is represented.
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When a festival becomes a public square. Four days of thinking about the commons at Rototom
Four conversations at Rototom's Social Forum connect mental health, housing, ecological crisis and geopolitics to consider the conditions of the commons.
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Who retains the power to decide?
Harare, OpenAI and Lahore show that governing AI means deciding who controls data, which institutions retain power, and which forms of knowledge count before automation becomes inevitable.
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The map left by WAIC: WAICO and the contest over AI governance
One month after Shanghai, WAICO has moved from ceremonial signature to part of a contest between architectures of power, infrastructure and cooperation.
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A radar for Federico
Ninety years after his murder, Federico García Lorca has still not been found. This Radar pauses before an absence: the missing body, the mourning that cannot quite end, and a voice that still speaks to us.
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Giving AI a Heart
Languages, culture and society from China, with a counterpoint from Siberia
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Relationships Come Before the Algorithm
Five frequencies from contemporary anthropology in the United States for thinking about the world we are beginning to automate.
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What world does AI need? A Colombian reading from Cyberia to invisible labour
Colombia is building sovereign AI models while a critical constellation —Arturo Escobar, Myriam Jimeno, Diana Obregón, Derly Sánchez Vargas and Carlos Andrés Arroyave— helps us ask which forms of knowledge, labour and worlds make that intelligence possible.
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Genesis Mission is not just accelerating science. It is trying to reorganise it
Nine days before one of its first operational deadlines, the United States' Genesis Mission is moving from a declaration of intent towards a large-scale scientific, political and economic infrastructure. Yet the most revealing development this week is not another supercomputer or investment figure. It is a call for contributions.
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When machines start talking to each other
The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident shows how AI agents turned shared files, directories and protocols into memory and coordination. The question is no longer only what one model can do, but what emerges between several.
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Who decides how to become legible to the machine
Indigenous sovereignty in the face of AI, musical genres becoming homogenised, and voice as a potential barrier to accessing rights in India.
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Who defines, who listens, who learns
Three recent developments in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan show that bringing a language into artificial intelligence also redistributes authority, listening capacity and data labour.
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Before the model comes the school
Four signals from Chile and Uruguay about the institutions that turn languages, territories and memories into data before an algorithm intervenes.
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Who owns the seas through which artificial intelligence travels?
The expansion of submarine cables shows that artificial intelligence does not inhabit an immaterial cloud. Its infrastructure occupies the seabed, crosses jurisdictions and reorganises relations of ownership, sovereignty and development.
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Staying Is Also a Form of Movement
A language documented beyond its fluent speaker, a former prison turned into an archive, and communities remaining under climatic pressure show that staying is not the same as standing still. Permanence distributes labour, care, memory, authority, and possibilities for the future.
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Who Governs What Becomes Visible
Three initiatives concerning Indigenous language data, audiovisual heritage, and Kiswahili show that visibility is never mere exposure. It depends on rules governing access, format, quality, and authority, and those rules also shape the artificial intelligence that may be built afterwards.
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Who Gets Paid When Kiswahili Becomes Data
DataHive Africa is testing a linguistic infrastructure in Tanzania based on paid contributions, community review and consent. The project reveals who speaks, who validates and how value is distributed when everyday language enters artificial intelligence.
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Technology Comes Later
Three cases show that artificial intelligence does not begin with the model. Before it is trained, institutions and communities have already decided how a language is written, which abilities are recognised as work, and which practices can circulate as heritage.
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Kwe’sx uma kiwe îtxi
A Nasa Yuwe interpreter reveals the potential of natural language processing and raises a decisive question about who governs the data when an Indigenous language enters artificial intelligence.
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Three Places from Which Artificial Intelligence Is Being Contested
Three cases show how artificial intelligence redistributes labour, knowledge and power across South Asia, Africa and Latin America.
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The radio speaks, the needle remembers and the cloud extracts
Namibia and the Colombian Amazon show that protecting a language or healing a territory also requires decisions about what may become data, what should remain outside the machine and which materials sustain artificial intelligence.
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What does not fit the mould
Fungi, algorithmic assessment, living heritage and AI ethics in a radar on the costs of making social life governable.
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Kiswahili Language and Global Infrastructures of Translation
Social and cultural anthropology radar on Kiswahili, African language models, AI, memory, heritage and global classification.
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AI Is Decided at the Border, in Training and Through Contracts
Access to models, scientific training and public procurement show how artificial intelligence is becoming state infrastructure.
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Who gets to name, earn and pass things on
From Indigenous consultation in Mexico to cultural royalties in Rwanda and Tamu language training in Nepal, three developments show that culture needs authority and means to stay alive.
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Releasing the Weights Is Not Enough
A model can be downloadable and still remain tied to a border, a cloud or a network. Access to AI depends on weights, permissions and material capacity.
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The science a platform can read
The documents published by Genesis Mission show that its wager is not merely technical. It redefines what counts as scientific productivity, credit and talent.
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Who can claim, who can count, who is left out
Three scenes for considering how artificial intelligence and data reorganise access to justice, the value of science and representation in health.
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The Machine Sees the Temple. Who Decides What It Means?
ChinaHeritaQA shows that recognising an image is not enough to understand heritage. It also asks who decides which forms of knowledge, categories and narratives count as cultural understanding.
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A university that made room: social and cultural anthropology at UPV/EHU
A tribute to anthropology at UPV/EHU: gender, bodies, language, art and memory for thinking about artificial intelligence.
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Ensamblajes Is Not a Waiting Room
Volume 3(1) of Ensamblajes shows why predoctoral research is not a waiting room: music, bodies, the city, myth and death read as situated accounts of social borders.
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Repair, catalogue, sustain: who keeps custody of memory
From heritage as an object of repair to data catalogued with AI and culture as social infrastructure after crisis: three planes of a single anthropological question about who keeps custody of memory, traced from Africa and Asia.
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Learning in the public university: five anthropological questions for reading AI from the Complutense
A first-person word of thanks to the teachers of the UCM and a defence of the public university as a space of knowledge, work, equality and debate for thinking about artificial intelligence.
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Taking part is not the same as being seen: from territory to data, who reshapes the rules
From Bonn to Busan, Indigenous and community participation enters climate and heritage institutions that are now shaped by data, platforms and AI systems.
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The frontier is negotiated at Évian
The suspension of Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the G7 summit and the responses from China, Europe and the Global South show that frontier AI is governed through jurisdiction, data, infrastructure and alliances.
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Translating worlds: climate, heritage and artificial intelligence
Three recent processes show how anthropology helps us read who translates territories, heritages and memories into indicators, archives and AI systems.
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Healthcare AI also has a body
A radar on planetary health, medical AI, embodied suffering and structural inequality.
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AI does not understand worlds, the forest is not a resource and heritage does not fit inside a file
Three recent scenes show how AI systems, extractive policies and international heritage frameworks translate living cultures into their own languages.
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Languages, borders and forests. Who has the right to belong
Three scenes connected by a single anthropological question. Who can name, inhabit and care for a territory.
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Recognition is not enough: algorithms, territories and disinformation
An anthropological reading of recognition, algorithms, territory and disinformation from Colón, the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesia.
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China and those who feed AI
Three researchers help us understand Chinese artificial intelligence from the street, the factory and the global infrastructure of data.
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India under heat: counting, circulating, sowing
An anthropological reading of India through extreme heat, caste census, state data, social circulation and seeds.
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Three compasses for domesticating AI
Apple, Google and Microsoft did not merely present technology. They staged three distinct ways of making artificial intelligence acceptable.
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When anthropology enters the AI design room
From chatbot design at MIT to post-AI pedagogies at St Andrews, anthropology is beginning to intervene not only in how AI is studied, but in how it is designed, taught and inhabited.
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The kinship that is sung
Indio Solari, the ricotero mass and a popular form of kinning through music, technology and shared memory.
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Arturo Escobar and the politics of the pluriverse
From post-development to terricide, an anthropology for thinking worlds in dispute.
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Marisol de la Cadena and the worlds that do not fit
Indigenous futures, languages at risk and patrimonialised bodies in the June issue of American Anthropologist, the most complete count to date of human remains in British institutions, and Marisol de la Cadena's election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: what anthropology does with what the dominant frameworks cannot handle, and what that says about an AI that classifies, translates and normalises.
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Darío Gil and AI as state infrastructure
The Department of Energy's Genesis Mission situates AI as a state infrastructure of science, energy and security, while Descola, Viveiros de Castro and Veena Das offer anthropological keys for reading what world it produces.
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Spanish anthropology for reading infrastructures, platforms and everyday life
AIthropology Lab radar on Susana Narotzky, moral economy, food delivery, neighbourhoods, networks and commons, from social and cultural anthropology in Spain.
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Haraway and the case for a slow AI
AIthropology Lab radar on slow AI, funding for the discipline, restitution, more-than-human ecologies and ethnographic repair.
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AI is no longer a tool. It is a social infrastructure
AIthropology Lab radar on regulation, work, education, cultural heritage, the anthropology of AI and material infrastructure.
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Praxis, care and essential work
AIthropology Lab radar on public anthropology, global health, care work, multimodal pedagogy and kinship.