For the first time in 22 years, an issue of Culture Machine appears in languages other than English, reflecting not only the appreciation that the journal has received in recent years beyond the so-called Global North, but also ongoing discussions, across the Radical Open Access community, about linguistic hierarchies and other epistemic injustices in academic publishing. Historically, Culture Machine has taken risks with the future, not least by partially relocating to a Spanish-speaking country the disciplinary histories and academic cultures of which do not articulate in obvious ways with the highly specific intellectual and institutional trajectories that gave rise to the journal’s distinctive approach to new media and technologies in the English-speaking world. One of the challenges that emerged from such a risky experiment therefore had to do with translation, yet in a complex sense. Since, as Heidegger said, the essence of technology is nothing technological, translation to or from languages other than English was never just a technical or an economic problem (even if that sort of explanation of Culture Machine’s persistent monolingualism would not be merely incorrect). It was always a problem of existence: a question of time and care. What would translation mean for Culture Machine? Having crossed the Atlantic and residing in a country with its own history of internal colonialism, including state violence against linguistic diversity, Culture Machine could not help to question any assumed separation between such a history and the global capitalist setup of academic knowledge production and circulation. Before translating anything in a mechanical or supposedly neutral way, Culture Machine had to reflect carefully on its own implication in such a mode of revealing. The volume guest-edited by Claudio Celis Bueno and raúl rodríguez freire, a philosopher of technology and a literary theorist, is not about specific regions of the planet where the majority of people speak Spanish or Portuguese, or even about how such languages translate the question concerning technology, or the environmental logics of extraction. Instead, it concerns the construction and deconstruction of anthropological fiction in a time of technological domination, and thus re-enacts Culture Machine’s foundational commitment to the task of thinking. That said, the journal is open to proposals and gifts of translation, which will be added to the volume as they come along.
