How did little development devices make their way into big development institutions? Jacqueline Best explores the history of policy failure at the World Bank.

Defense lawyer Tor Ekeland gives us an up-close, first-person view of a widespread pathology: how misplaced fear and hysteria is driving an over-reaction to the positive work that hackers can do.

Jonathan Morduch traces the rise of microfinance, and argues that it's time for a new vision.

Is your mobile phone company seeing like a state? Emma Park and Kevin P. Donovan explore telecommunications and contemporary nationalism in Kenya.

Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer examine the politics of wind and power – in all their turbulence – in Oaxaca, Mexico

How do cheesemongers extend the value of a dying commodity? Heather Paxson explores how mongers care for living cheese—and for the craft of their trade.

The Limn interview with Dan Gerstein of Gotham Ghostwriters

[From The Cross Cultural Partnership website. Discussed by James Leach in his presentation.–ed] DRAFT version 0.3, September 2007 Preamble The cross-cultural partnership template is designed to help potential collaborators to reach understanding and agreement on the terms of their collaboration. In many contexts people look to the law to establish or enforce a ‘safe space’ ...

Michael Guggenheim The conference organisers Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Adolfo Estalella state at the beginning of their invitation: “prototypes have acquired certain prominence and visibility in recent times”. What I want to focus on is what the words “visibility” and “recent times” may mean in the above sentence. The problem here is that the conference ...

A brief introduction to the idea behind Issue Number Nine, and the concepts associated with it.

David Reubi explores how Chicago Economics remade Global Public Health.

Christopher Kelty opens up a toolkit from the 1990s to explore the prehistory of apps, platforms, and algorithms.

Gabriella Coleman and Christopher Kelty guide readers through Limn Number 8 on Hacks, Leaks, and Breaches.

A self-driving car is a computer you put your body in. Fiction by Cory Doctorow.

Can hackers be certified? Rebecca Slayton looks at efforts to blend, certify and market the subversive skills of hacking with the ethos of professionalism.

Why is lead-contaminated water a matter of public concern but contaminated housing is not? Catherine Fennell explores infrastructure and the politics of solidarity.

Five year planning is dead. Long live the five year plan! Andrew Barry explores infrastructure's transparencies and opacities in the UK

Boris Jardine tells the story of a little ladder intended to tell us what everyone wants. Where on the ladder are you?

Judith Kaplan explores the possibility of a new GOLD standard for archiving the world's endangered language data.

Anthropologist and retail consultant Michael Powell takes us on a stroll down Aisle #6. What's in the center of the grocery store and why is it causing a crisis in the industry?

Christopher Otter diagnoses the impossibility of fully governing large-scale food systems and the novel ecologies they create.

One of the more spectacular signs of the onset of climate change is the decline of the polar bear population. But is it really in decline? Etienne Benson traces the long and controversial history of modeling the future population of polar bears.

How do we know if we are where it's at? Tarleton Gillespie explores the controversy over Twitter Trends and the algorithmic 'censorship' of #occupywallstreet.

What happens when a crowd decides to think for it- self? Daniel Kreiss explores the answer in the 2008 Obama campaign.

The chatbot, the librarian, and the "extra clever mongoose"

That death is not the end

The museum’s army of invisible labor

In the realm of U.S. homeland security, the word of the day seems to be “resilience.” Benjamin Sims explains.

Deborah Cowen tracks how the movement of goods shapes the meaning of risk.

Lucy Suchman Our conference prototype – the document created by Chris – had the prototypical characteristic of just-in-time production, which meant that I’ve only been able to engage with it properly after the fact. Doing so was a pleasure, and leaves me wishing now for another iteration of the conference. But at least ARCEpisode2 provides ...

On the road to Uganda’s future

An interview with R2R advocate Kyle Wiens

As media forms come and go, why do cassette tapes live on?

Why are farmers burying underwear in their fields?

​​How whaling history lives on in Nantucket’s energy politics

What does keeping the lower Mississippi River open for shipping have to do with coastal land loss, regional ecological change, and a pile of rocks? Joshua Lewis explores the relationship between transportation and ecological chokepoints in Louisiana.

From within the interminable traffic jams of Dakar, Senegal, Caroline Melly examines how bottlenecks—or embouteillages—have become a fixture of modern life and a window into local ideas about global im/mobility and future possibility.

Jamie Cross explores how a solar-powered lamp became the go-to solution to Puerto Rico’s energy crisis.

Financial algorithms have smoothed the vagaries of overheated markets. Christian Borch shows how algorithmic trading produces its own set of new chokepoints.

Suppose you wanted to test the reality of democracy. Tired of claims and counter-claims, of endless debates about ideals and aspirations, and deeply unconvinced by the arguments of political philosophers, you would like to produce some real, hard facts; to verify, once and for all, that democracy really exists – that it can be successfully ...

Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University ‘The future arrives sooner here.’ I’m driving my car down Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto, California one evening around 1995 and I hear this assertion on U.S. National Public Radio, spoken by a Silicon Valley technologist who’s being interviewed.  It elicits a familiar response – a certain tightening in my stomach, ...

Alice Street examines the market infrastructure behind off-grid diagnostics.

Brenda Chalfin reflects on the use of design as a little development device.

Meena Khandelwal and Kayley Lain reflect on half a century of failed efforts to change how people cook in rural India, before adding a little device of their own to the fire.

Amy Moran-Thomas examines why diabetes patients worldwide still struggle to measure glucose.

Anke Schwittay and Paul Braund explore the curious intersection between international aid and design.

How did we get to state-sponsored hacking? Matt Jones traces the legal authorities and technical capacities that have transformed the power of the nation-state since the 1990s.

Journalist Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai talks with Limn about the details of the DNC hacks, making sense of leaks, and being a journalist working on hackers today.

Cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter talks with Limn about infrastructure hacking, the DNC hacks, the work of reporting on hackers and much more.

Not all engineers create equally. Götz Bachmann takes us inside the labs of "radical engineers" and the starkly different futures they imagine for us.

Philosopher-kings or Fawkes masks? Ashley Gorham explores the truth-telling zeal of WikiLeaks and the lulzy opinions of Anonymous.

What is the speed of hacking? Luca Follis and Adam Fish explore the temporality of hacking and leaking in the cases of Snowden, the DNC leaks and the Lauri Love case.

Soe Lin Aung examines the Thilawa special economic zone to shed light on infrastructure’s changing publics in contemporary Myanmar.

What makes a city smart? Alan Wiig examines a project to promote urban development through information infrastructure in Philadelphia.

Do you know how to read your electricity bill? Canay Özden-Schilling examines how new electricity experts—and new publics—are creating and contesting the price of U.S. household energy today.

What is the scope for local planning in large-scale infrastructure projects today? Stephen J. Collier, Savannah Cox, and Kevin Grove explore the multiple publics of flood control in New York City

The total archive is already here, Balázs Bodó finds it hidden in the shadows and run by pirates.

Vadig de Croehling, Director of Ideation, Process, and Interface at the Group for Research on Experimental Accumulation and Speculative Archives (REASArch), offers a sampling of elements from one of his organization’s most inscrutable archival projects.

Andrew Lakoff revisits the received wisdom that the WHO was slow to respond. Slow to respond to what exactly?

Where there is no kit and no infrastructure, there is vulnerability. Peter Redfield explores the role of medical humanitarian response in the Ebola crisis.

Nicholas B. King looks back at the dialectics of confidence and paranoia in the Ebola outbreaks of 1995 and 2014

Joanna Radin explores the role of the "hot zone" in immobilizing people, blood and information

Global health is like the viruses it claims to be combatting; Theresa MacPhail explains how.

The timeline of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, compiled by Andrew Lakoff

Food system activist Anna Lappé takes stock of the pieces in this issue.

Big companies are not just tracing their products’ life stories, but telling them too. Susanne Freidberg explores why.

What do barn swallows reveal about the future? In the biogeographical space of "the Zone" around Chernobyl, Adriana Petryna shows us how they force us to think about the origins of extinction.

Vanessa Manceron argues that when naturalists take part in monitoring programs on their “local patch,” they are caught between two forms surveillance: care and control.

Diethylstilbestrol was one of the first identified endocrine disruptors. However, efforts to warn french physicians about the drug’s potentially dangerous effects on pregnant women failed. Emmanuelle Fillion and Didier Torny show how sentinels sometimes don’t work.

How do you turn millions of people into a CPU? Lilly Irani unravels the mysteries of human-as-computation in Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Learning how Anonymous works means learning to be one. Gabriella Coleman narrates her experience of being in between worlds.

Micro-lending plus crowd-sourcing creates its own problems. Roma Jhaveri explains how to keep crowds happy.

Elections are still about shaking hands and kissing babies, for the time being. Maria Vidart explores the first experience with social media campaigning in Colombia.

Prototyping Prototyping began as a conference publication that was finished before the conference. Its goal was to be a “prototype” of a conference on prototyping cultures. 

[this text discusses the “Para-Sites” project of the Center for Ethnography and it’s first event, on death penalty mitigation (see exhibit Y) — ed.] Classic anthropological ethnography, especially in its development in the apprentice project/dissertation form, was designed to  provide answers, or at least  data, for questions that  anthropology had for it. Nowadays, anthropology itself ...

We have heard about the emperor’s clothes, but what about the sovereign’s appetite?

Learning modules and the possibilities of cross-pollination

Communicative space is a forgotten remedy

Seeing the relationships that leak from the frame

Aspirational health is not cheap