Bill Benzon
30 Dec 2025 - 28 Feb 2026
- An independent researcher, I have been seeing his name for years without getting a strong sense of what he does. Despite his interests and mine seeming to have a very high overlap. He has an enormous output.
- (42) The Magic of the Bell: How Networks of Social Actors Create Cultural Beings
- Emergence of agents in group music playing, quoting Latour...
Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the sixteenth century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break,” before the odd invention of matter. —Bruno Latour, An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto
- (42) Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper More recent (2025)
The advancement of AI offers us the choice between contrasting paradigms for organizing human life: Homo Economicus (where work is the defining activity) and Homo Ludens (where play is the defining activity). Drawing on Johan Huizinga's work and Kim Stanley Robinson's speculative fiction, I propose that humanity faces a critical juncture as AI increasingly dominates economic production. The document develops a theoretical framework for a "Fourth Arena" of existence-beyond matter, life, and human culture-that emerges through human-AI interaction.