Bina Venkataraman

What Could be Unsettling about New Settlements?

in How Will We Govern Ourselves in Space?

I think we’re already mov­ing into a very—uncom­fort­ably for most of us, into a place where nation-states, gov­ern­ments, are being forced to cede author­i­ty to cor­po­ra­tions. And that is going to, I assume, hap­pen faster and faster. And if you throw in space, if you throw in the lim­it­less­ness of space, then I mean…the sky’s the lim­it so to speak. I don’t know what the…where that takes us. 

The Spawn of Frankenstein: Fear of the Unknown

in The Spawn of Frankenstein

It’s not the strange­ness of new tech­nolo­gies that fright­ens us but the way tech­nol­o­gy threat­ens to make us strangers to our­selves. In a semi-Freudian spir­it, then, I’d like to pro­pose that where Frankenstein and its spawn are con­cerned, our fear of the unknown may real­ly be about our dis­com­fort with knowing.