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AbstractAs computational systems burgeon with advancing artificial intelligence (AI), the deterministic frameworks underlying them face novel challenges, especially when interfacing with self-modifying code. The Executioner Paradox, introduced herein, exemplifies such a challenge where a deterministic Executioner Machine (EM) grapples with self-aware and self-modifying code. This unveils a self-referential dilemma, highlighting a gap in current deterministic computational frameworks when faced with self-evolving code. In this article, the Executioner Paradox is proposed, highlighting the nuanced interactions between deterministic decision-making and self-aware code, and the ensuing challenges. This article advocates for a re-evaluation of existing deterministic frameworks, emphasizing the need for adaptive decision-making mechanisms in computational systems. By dissecting the Executioner Paradox, the aim is to foster a robust discussion on evolving deterministic frameworks to accommodate the dynamic nature of self-modifying code, thereby contributing a forward-looking lens to the discourse on computational systems amidst advancing AI.

AbstractThis essay traces how sailors aboard wooden sailing vessels (dhows) negotiate mobility across the Indian Ocean, revealing their precarious conditions preceding the COVID-19 pandemic that came to the fore after 2020. Focusing on Yusuf, a sailor in captivity in Iran during the pandemic, the essay suggests that the pandemic shone new light on preexisting patronage relations. However, these relations were creatively harnessed by laborers in times of crisis. Accustomed to sanctions regimes that restricted movement even before the pandemic, Yusuf facilitated his release through new patronage networks that built on his previous experiences of precarity. Rather than seeing this pandemic as a rupture, the essay argues that it led to an intensification of preexisting labor relations, such as patronage. The COVID-19 pandemic saw contagion, threat, vulnerability, devaluation, and precarity being used widely; however, these ideas were sutured to the Global South long before this pandemic, through sanctions regimes, occupation, and conflicts that restricted movement and disrupted supply chains. Patronage, then, was one mode in which maritime laborers navigated a geopolitical realm suffused with the language of threat and contagion. This essay charts a complex geopolitical reordering across the Global South, one not always mediated by the West.

What does it mean to have a deity as a ruler in the contemporary Indian sociopolitical context? How does a divine entity act as a governing authority in modern society while retaining relevance and considerable influence within the everyday lives of its subjects? These are some questions that this article tries to pursue in an attempt to understand the multiple, interconnected channels through which the sovereignty of a deity is exercised and reinforced in the context of the Kullu district in the Indian Himalayas. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kullu, this article argues that the agency of the deity operates through a network of actors individually invested in protecting the sovereignty of the deity and, by extension, the distributed nature of this sovereignty. The paper discusses how the deity's sense of agency as an individual sovereign agent is an important factor within the cosmopolitical landscape of Kullu, where the deity institution acts as a form of local governance coexisting with the state.

Suranjan Das, Interrogating Politics and Society: Twentieth-Century Indian Subcontinent (New Delhi: Primus), 2014, 228 pp., ₹950 (Hb).

AbstractThe COVID pandemic has brought a spectacular prominence to the role of digital technologies in public health. However, the policy discourse about digital technology has been for the most part strikingly narrow. Even as there is a discussion of the impact of particular digital tools, there is relatively little deliberation on the broader issues of how these technologies are reconstituting core aspects of health systems and polities. How did we get to a narrow debate on a vast topic? One way to understand this irony is by turning to the history of an older technology, namely agricultural biotechnology. This article focuses on two dominant framings that significantly narrowed the debates on agricultural biotechnology: first, a narrative that had a relentless focus on agricultural biotechnology as a neatly delineated field that produced stable products, and second, the ascent of a language of ethics that elided structural explanations and addressed only downstream impacts. The brief foray into the early years of agricultural biotechnology is useful in understanding contemporary politics of digital technology.