In 2024, the US government formally proposed to establish time standards for celestial bodies around the Earth—including a distinct time reference system for the moon to be introduced by 2027 named Coordinated Lunar Time. In this paper, we consider how this proposal provides an opportune moment to draw parallels to the way temporal standards have previously been implemented on Earth, as well as opening questions about how time scales in outer space might be equitably implemented in the future. To do so, we develop two critical lenses through which the time and temporalities of the moon can be studied. First, we advance the notion of governance objects to think critically about the limits of understanding moon time as a universal standard developed by US and European actors. Second, we approach Coordinated Lunar Time as a technology of colonialization by studying the relationship between this proposal and the inception of Western timekeeping technologies by colonial states and actors. We conclude by arguing that Science and Technology Studies can offer much in critically examining emerging time standards intended for outer space territories, as well as offering critical entryways for considering how lunar time might be construed differently.
This paper examines how ride-hailing and delivery workers in Indonesia and the Philippines, as active technology actors, navigate and contest digital infrastructures that govern their labor. In contexts marked by platform dependency and labor insecurity, we move beyond discrete accounts of compliance and resistance to argue that worker agency lies in the capacity to move fluidly along a continuum of optimization and subversion practices. Drawing on 142 worker interviews, we find that these practices are embedded in the shifting dynamics of permissibility on platforms, workers’ familiarity with their apps, and the everyday ethical positioning of workers who continually balance the need to maintain access to the platform with efforts to improve pay and conditions. This dynamic exposes a paradox: platforms rely on workers’ ingenuity to patch systemic gaps and sustain operations even as they attempt to constrain it. By allowing oscillation between optimization and subversion, platforms defuse frustration, manage precarity, and secure their own endurance. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how survival-driven adaptations both express worker agency and coshape platform capitalism from below—showing that platform arrangements are engineered from above yet are continually sustained, challenged, and reshaped through workers’ everyday practice.
Despite increasing integration of Big Data into law enforcement globally, few studies have examined how police officers construct ethical narratives around it. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article adopts a sociotechnical perspective to analyze how police officers in Portugal engage with ethical discourse on Big Data in policing and criminal investigations. Based on thirty-four interviews with members of the Judiciary Police (Polícia Judiciária) and the Public Security Police (Polícia de Segurança Pública), the article reveals how ethical considerations are strategically mobilized to legitimize Big Data adoption while minimizing external scrutiny. Though officers acknowledge risks, such as privacy violations and threats to human rights, these concerns are framed in ways that shift responsibility to lawmakers and information technology professionals. Furthermore, public engagement is not positioned as a tool for democratic deliberation but as a performative mechanism to secure societal acceptance of Big Data policing. These narratives exemplify a broader phenomenon of “ethics washing” where ethical discourse functions as a strategic tool to reinforce institutional legitimacy and facilitate technological adoption. By conceptually extending the notions of ethics washing and performativity to the field of policing, based on an empirical example, this article contributes to STS research on technology ethics and Big Data.
Genebanks, established to counter the decline of biodiversity, preserve for potential use what is threatened with loss. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the animal department of the Center for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands of Wageningen University & Research, I explore what it means in practice to conserve diversity, with a focus on conserving the genetic diversity of cattle. Drawing on literature on potentiality from STS and anthropology, I analyze how the conservation of cattle genetic diversity is potentialized based on two logics. The first logic is grounded in the politics of extinction and loss. Genetic material is frozen as “fire insurance” against the risk of declining breed populations and extinction. The second logic centers on the value of native and rare breeds whose characteristics are conserved to anticipate and produce ecologically sustainable futures. Genetic diversity is seen as a “painter's palette” or “toolbox” to breed “future-proof” cattle. By analyzing these logics, I contribute to understanding potentiality not merely as a latent quality of frozen life, but as actively shaped within the infrastructural and political conditions of genebanks, thereby shaping how bovine life is valued and which agricultural futures are made possible.
“Noisy listening” explores resonances between sound and climate change by listening to and thinking with noise, being in noise as conditions shift more or less dramatically, taking form and becoming palpable or legible, or remaining indeterminate. Noise as a way of knowing is at once phenomenal and epistemological, its materio-semiotic status providing an opening for conceptualizing climate change as a vibratory milieu. I develop a reading of the concept of milieu as participatory, supporting an understanding of anthropogenic climate change as immanent rather than external to sensing subjects. This reading is sustained through a discussion of ways in which noise resonates with key aspects of climate change: as atmospheric or generalizable, as emergent, and as uncertain. While vibration provides a starting point for understanding sound as immanent, the article treats noise as capacious. Its forms, definitions, and operations emerge across a range of cases, writings, artworks, and musical compositions as low-frequency sound, noise pollution, loudness, the uncertainty of unknowability, and a capacity to rework existing logics from within.
