Issue 1: Digital Animals Inhabiting the Intersections of Nature, Culture, and Technology

Collaborating with Dr. Melissa Bianchi, the inaugural issue of Trace collects articles exploring the role of technology in human-animal relations and the ethical impacts of digital technologies on environments and their inhabitants. Authors blend digital media methods with animal studies to explore how digital technology and nonhuman animals continually (re)define not only our concepts of the “human” and the “humanities,” but also to question ontological inquiry broadly.

NOTE: I strongly disown and disagree with Trace leadership's current academic nihilism towards the encroachment of AI on writing, learning, and education. Resignation to the forces of capital and empire are not what critical inquiry looks like, and I have no patience for half-hearted "resisting from the inside" or “you can’t fight city hall”-esque refrains that leverage our graduate work on the nonhuman to dress up acquiescent obedience as critical thought for career-driven purposes. AI is anything but nonhuman. Instead, it is a deep expression of humanity’s egotism, greed, cruelty, violence, and fear driven by key human figures of late capitalism whose motives are profit and exploitation. It is narcissus using nature to gaze into nothing but the void of his own reflection (while poisoning rural and minority communities, animals, and the planet), something our first and second issue intentionally critique. Issues one and two should be read as a nothing less than a sincere “fuck you” to anything and anyone pushing this technology. My sincerest apologies to the incredible authors who contributed their work to these issues for the current direction of the Trace Initiative. We can imagine a better world, and we don't need the tools of corrupt dickheads to do it.

These views are my own, and I do not speak for my co-editor.