This paper critically revisits traditional perspectives on technology within academic and scientific writing
studies. It aims to comprehend the intricate, emerging, and dynamic sociotechnical configurations that underlie contemporary
scientific practices. These practices increasingly involve language, text, and literacy practices, seen as products of the
collaboration between humans and machines. The paper draws on empirical research on influential institutional metadiscourses in
high-impact scientific writing produced and/or disseminated by public universities and a research institute in the State of São
Paulo (Brazil), whose local policies of globalization are driven by international university rankings. I use a qualitative content
analysis approach grounded in socio-anthropological, socio-semiotic, and pragmatic studies of linguistic ideologies to shed light
on how ideological and socio-semiotic processes support the metapragmatics of scientific writing in university policy documents.
This metapragmatics is utterly alien to the role of performative sociotechnical infrastructures in the production, distribution,
and hierarchization of scientific texts. Additionally, these documents do not account for the diverse conditions and restrictions
that shape the production and circulation of academic knowledge in geopolitically marginal and equally diverse regions within the
country, including those within São Paulo.