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An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network
With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine , Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo’s commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life—one with unique limitations and possibilities.
An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population.
An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population.
- GenresAnthropologyTechnology
320 pages, Paperback
Published June 19, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 10, 2025
Train book for train rides -- makes you feel like you can see the matrix, except that stretch on video games
June 22, 2022
The population and train network in Tokyo can be viewed as a collective--if we mind the gap.
In this unique book, Fisch invites us to "think with" the train, to use the awesome size and complexity of the Tokyo commuter train network as a way to think about what it means for humans and machines to co-evolve into a single collective. The key, Fisch insists, is "the gap," the indeterminacy of the technology, the fact that it doesn't always do what you expect. Sometimes it's a minor issue of paying attention to when your stop is coming, and sometimes it's a catastrophic malfunction like the Amagasaki derailment of 2005. If there were no gap, there would be no potential for relating, and technology would be inanimate.
This book is composed of six sub-studies plus an introduction and conclusion. I found the introduction and conclusion painfully jargonistic, but I guess readers conditioned in the ways of contemporary anthropology writing would find it "normal."
The six case studies are
1. "Finessing the interval" We are introduced to the daiya, the schedule and the margin of indeterminacy, the ways in which the initial daiya responds to the realities of human behavior to shift its times. That responsiveness is how the technology "relates" to people.
2. "Inhabiting the interval" We meet the commuters, learn about their norms and concerns. We follow how the design of the train space, advertisements, cell phones and the "male gaze" combine to create the culture of the train commuter.
3. "Operation without capacity" Now we reach the technically most thrilling part of the study: "Autonomous Decentralized Transport Operation Control System" (ATOS), a decentralized emergent technology which enables the rail operators to eliminate the concept of "capacity" because the system can simply evolve to take on more and more load.
4. "Gaming the interval" Japanese artists have not failed to notice the centrality of the train experience. Here we "read" films, mobile games and a made-for-train-reading book/game. This was probably the weakest part of the book. Not bad, just kind of unremarkable.
5. "Forty-four minutes" Now we kick into high gear as we meet the "maguro train," so called because that's what it looks like after a person commits suicide by jumping in front of the train. Did you ever wonder how the train network responds after someone jumps in front of a train? Who cleans up??? This is the chapter for you.
6. "Ninety seconds" In my opinion, this chapter is the highlight of the book. After the Amagasaki derailment in 2005, killing 106 (or was it 107?) people, the latent questions of what it means to live your life intertwined with a train network suddenly became very real. In particular the citizens' support group "4.25 network" cut through the inertia that plagues Japanese politics to force JR West to really articulate their priorities, culminating in the essential question: "why did my loved one have to die because of a 90 second delay in the daiya?" The use of youyu as a technological concept that reflected an emotional reality of forgiveness was a sublime example of a sort of technological spirituality.
Overall, I loved the book. Some parts like chapter 4 and the introduction had a kind of "yea, i guess you COULD say that" quality that plagues a lot of anthropology, and the introduction was almost comically overwrought in its use of anthropological jargon, but it was more than compensated for by the probing studies in the other chapters. If I had to rank them in descending order of awesome: 6, 3, 5, 1, 2, 4.
Even though while reading the book, wondered what does "thinking with" even mean??? The next day I realized I was doing it myself while discussing unrelated socioeconomic issues with a friend.
In this unique book, Fisch invites us to "think with" the train, to use the awesome size and complexity of the Tokyo commuter train network as a way to think about what it means for humans and machines to co-evolve into a single collective. The key, Fisch insists, is "the gap," the indeterminacy of the technology, the fact that it doesn't always do what you expect. Sometimes it's a minor issue of paying attention to when your stop is coming, and sometimes it's a catastrophic malfunction like the Amagasaki derailment of 2005. If there were no gap, there would be no potential for relating, and technology would be inanimate.
This book is composed of six sub-studies plus an introduction and conclusion. I found the introduction and conclusion painfully jargonistic, but I guess readers conditioned in the ways of contemporary anthropology writing would find it "normal."
The six case studies are
1. "Finessing the interval" We are introduced to the daiya, the schedule and the margin of indeterminacy, the ways in which the initial daiya responds to the realities of human behavior to shift its times. That responsiveness is how the technology "relates" to people.
2. "Inhabiting the interval" We meet the commuters, learn about their norms and concerns. We follow how the design of the train space, advertisements, cell phones and the "male gaze" combine to create the culture of the train commuter.
3. "Operation without capacity" Now we reach the technically most thrilling part of the study: "Autonomous Decentralized Transport Operation Control System" (ATOS), a decentralized emergent technology which enables the rail operators to eliminate the concept of "capacity" because the system can simply evolve to take on more and more load.
4. "Gaming the interval" Japanese artists have not failed to notice the centrality of the train experience. Here we "read" films, mobile games and a made-for-train-reading book/game. This was probably the weakest part of the book. Not bad, just kind of unremarkable.
5. "Forty-four minutes" Now we kick into high gear as we meet the "maguro train," so called because that's what it looks like after a person commits suicide by jumping in front of the train. Did you ever wonder how the train network responds after someone jumps in front of a train? Who cleans up??? This is the chapter for you.
6. "Ninety seconds" In my opinion, this chapter is the highlight of the book. After the Amagasaki derailment in 2005, killing 106 (or was it 107?) people, the latent questions of what it means to live your life intertwined with a train network suddenly became very real. In particular the citizens' support group "4.25 network" cut through the inertia that plagues Japanese politics to force JR West to really articulate their priorities, culminating in the essential question: "why did my loved one have to die because of a 90 second delay in the daiya?" The use of youyu as a technological concept that reflected an emotional reality of forgiveness was a sublime example of a sort of technological spirituality.
Overall, I loved the book. Some parts like chapter 4 and the introduction had a kind of "yea, i guess you COULD say that" quality that plagues a lot of anthropology, and the introduction was almost comically overwrought in its use of anthropological jargon, but it was more than compensated for by the probing studies in the other chapters. If I had to rank them in descending order of awesome: 6, 3, 5, 1, 2, 4.
Even though while reading the book, wondered what does "thinking with" even mean??? The next day I realized I was doing it myself while discussing unrelated socioeconomic issues with a friend.
March 11, 2024
Really want to love the book more. It has all the ingredients I like: Simondon's technics (which I read through Stieger), railway diagram, popular culture (with post-bubble moral panic), mix of ethnography with history, and a healthy dose of drama.
The problem, I feel, is the theory-laden first three chapters and their overly defensive tone. Surely to read Japanese social phenomenon with French theory is fine and no one is asking for returning to an essentialist/techno-orentialist reading, but the book can do much more by allowing the interlocutors speak and theorize more about the world they live in, rather than rely on the author's interview or dropping trendy quotes on them. The analyses all make sense, yet they have overwhelmed the ethnographical encounter as presented in the last two chapters.
That being said, the book is still a good media study (if not anthropology) scholarship despite the tendency of reading everything as text, which, to be honest, I personally has the tendency to do but can never achieve it so elegantly.
The problem, I feel, is the theory-laden first three chapters and their overly defensive tone. Surely to read Japanese social phenomenon with French theory is fine and no one is asking for returning to an essentialist/techno-orentialist reading, but the book can do much more by allowing the interlocutors speak and theorize more about the world they live in, rather than rely on the author's interview or dropping trendy quotes on them. The analyses all make sense, yet they have overwhelmed the ethnographical encounter as presented in the last two chapters.
That being said, the book is still a good media study (if not anthropology) scholarship despite the tendency of reading everything as text, which, to be honest, I personally has the tendency to do but can never achieve it so elegantly.
January 8, 2019
'We need to transform our understanding of technology if we hope for collective life to not only survive but thrive on this planet.
MIND THE GAP
When thinking from within this gap, this margin of indeterminacy, it makes no difference whether a technology is industrial or postindustrial, mechanical or informational. Industrial and postindustrial, modern and postmodern are simply period qualifiers complicit with a modern teleological narrative of technological progress as the fashioning of endless novelty for the sake of driving economic consumption. What matters, rather, is the technicity of a machine—the degree of collective potential that it elicits. Approaching technology in terms of its technicity places emphasis on the quality of collective a technology affords, where quality refers to the degree of a machine’s or technical ensemble’s margin of indeterminacy and its corollary capacity for a reticular flourishing.'
MIND THE GAP
When thinking from within this gap, this margin of indeterminacy, it makes no difference whether a technology is industrial or postindustrial, mechanical or informational. Industrial and postindustrial, modern and postmodern are simply period qualifiers complicit with a modern teleological narrative of technological progress as the fashioning of endless novelty for the sake of driving economic consumption. What matters, rather, is the technicity of a machine—the degree of collective potential that it elicits. Approaching technology in terms of its technicity places emphasis on the quality of collective a technology affords, where quality refers to the degree of a machine’s or technical ensemble’s margin of indeterminacy and its corollary capacity for a reticular flourishing.'
September 27, 2023
The book departs from a detailed description of the “machine” that the Tokyo train system is, applies an analysis of the gap between ideal and actual worlds, and lands in a critique of late capitalism. The critique feels added on the fly to be honest, but the gap theory is spot on, and applying it to Tokyo trains is nothing short of brilliant.
I found this book very hard to read at times, but every complicated sentence finds its way home, and there’s a poetic beauty in that.
This book was inspiring in showing what an ethnography can be.
I found this book very hard to read at times, but every complicated sentence finds its way home, and there’s a poetic beauty in that.
This book was inspiring in showing what an ethnography can be.
February 16, 2025
Ingenious approach to technology not as something scary and coercive, and to humans not as automatons nor conscripts. Rather the author emphasizes we co-create collective socio-technical life; there is no possibility of purging technology from our lives. Technologies, then, that are designed to operate without human intervention (nuclear reactors is his example), and that cannot be relied upon in times of crisis, are dangerous insofar as they leave no space for ethical collectives to emerge from them.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews