One might call Benedict Evans an anthropologist of our digital age, as he’s been observing and analyzing its technological changes for over two decades. Before deciding to become an independent observer, he started his career at various venture capital and equity firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Entrepreneur First, and Mosaic Ventures. Now, he provides over 175,000 readers with his observations of the technosphere’s pulse as he interprets which of its often disruptive changes actually matter in his weekly newsletter. As a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where he studied history, Evans' perspective is imbued with observations that aren’t limited to technological innovations but also include all the fantastical hopes from which they spring – and their more practical meanings in our everyday world – giving his view of reality that human touch which is often far more potent than the code itself. In any case, a conversation with him can take many marvelous, surprising turns: From one moment to the next, you jump from an industrial-ecological look at a Billy Wilder film (The Apartment with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon) to the question of why saying hello in English lifts and American elevators is experienced as inappropriate, whereas in Germany it is good manners – and this in turn is only the prelude to the question of how accounting is changing under the influence of digitalisation, among many others in our conversation with him.

Benedict Evans lives in New York. In addition to his newsletter and regular essays on his blog, he also presents his insights to major corporations such as Alphabet, Amazon, AT&T, Axa, Bertelsmann, Deutsche Telekom, Hitachi, L'Oréal, LVMH, Nasdaq, Swiss Re, Visa, Warner Media, Verizon and Vodafone.

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While the harbingers were already visible long before, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear that the days of the comparatively peaceful post-war order are numbered. Nevertheless, the calculations leading to all of this remain largely mysterious. How could a society such as the Russian one embark on such an adventure in which it reveals itself to the world as a terrorist state? The historian Sergei Medvedev, who saw the approaching catastrophe coming with his The Return of the Russian Leviathan, goes back deep into Russia's history to explain Putin's motivation - to figures such as Ivan the Terrible, the Golden Horde and the Chekists, who personify the legal State of Emergency. Medvedev's diagnosis, which sees Russia as the unconscious of a spiritually eroding postmodern age, is extremely dark. According to him, the invasion of Ukraine marked the beginning of World War III, which began with the invasion of Ukraine.

Sergei Medvedev is an Affiliate Professor at Charles University in Prague. Born in Moscow, he studied at Moscow University and Columbia University in New York City. He specializes in political history, international affairs, and Russian studies. After over 15 years as a Professor and Associate Dean at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, he left Russia in March 2022. For many years, Sergei Medvedev was a contributing columnist to Russian Forbes, Vedomosti, and The Republic and filmed programs on history and culture for the Russian Kultura TV and TV Rain. Since 2015, he has been working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where he hosts the intellectual talk show Arkheologiya.

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There is no doubt that the margins of society can reveal something about what shifts within. And this is precisely what’s drawn our attention to a young anthropologist whose work with young, primarily indigenous drug addicts in Vancouver reveals a picture that’s as paradoxical as it is surprising: namely a driving force behind addiction is an irrepressible longing for normality, that suburban life with a wife, family and steady job that’s been vaulted by the media in such role models as the vanilla girl, the tradwife, and the family guy. This indicates that the ‘normalcy of the everyday’ which the boomer generation fled has become an unredeemable dream of life for even large sections of the working class, raising the question if this normalcy has become an unredeemable life dream even for large sections of the working class. If that’s the case, it indicates yet another major upheaval in our current Social Drive. In a way, this also mirrors Danya Fast’s anthropological career. After examining the life dreams of young men in Africa as part of her early collaborative work, her gaze shifted to her native Vancouver: to the living conditions of young people who, as the title of her book says, The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver. Indeed, the drug crisis, having been exacerbated by the advent of fentanyl, shapes the image of this highly affluent city. As in San Francisco, luxury and misery go hand in hand. In the tradition of participant observation, which has characterized anthropology since Malinowski, Danya Fast immersed herself in the underground life of this city - and that’s what our conversation is all about.

Danya Fast received her MA from the University of Amsterdam and her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of British Columbia, where she’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. Her research papers and interests can be found at Academia, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar.

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