The futures of anticipatory reason: Contingency and speculation in the sting operation

Hong, Sun‐ha; Szpunar, Piotr M.

doi:10.1177/0967010619850332

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Due to the anticipatory features of data and predictive modelling, however, the relationship between media and the future is changing. This has in turn prompted a tide of explorations of the future tense in media studies (see for example Andrejevic 2019, Hong and Szpunar 2019, Zylinska 2020, Pentzold, et al 2020, to which I also hope to contribute. AI is anticipatory media in several senses.…”

Section: Anticipatory Media: From Abstract Media Futures To Anticipatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Limit Situations

Lagerkvist¹

2020

jdsr

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In the present age AI (artificial intelligence) emerges as both a medium to and message about (or even from) the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects. Discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the human horizon at the end times, this theoretical essay scrutinizes the ‘inevitability’ of AI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become living myths, by attending how the technology is embedded in broader appropriations of the future tense. Reclaiming anticipation existentially, by drawing and expanding on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers – and his concept of the limit situation – I offer an invitation beyond the prospects and limits of ‘the new AI Era’ of predictive modelling, exploitation and dataism. I submit that the present moment of technological transformation and of escalating multi-faceted and interrelated global crises, is a digital limit situation in which there are entrenched existential and politico-ethical stakes of anticipatory media. Attending to them as a ‘future present’ (Adam and Groves 2007, 2011), taking responsible action, constitutes our utmost capability and task. The essay concludes that precisely here lies the assignment ahead for pursuing a post-disciplinary, integrative and generative form of Humanities and Social Sciences as a method of hope, that engages AI designers in the pursuit of an inclusive and open future of existential and ecological sustainability.

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Section: Anticipatory Media: From Abstract Media Futures To Anticipatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Limit Situations

Lagerkvist¹

2020

jdsr

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“…The workings of algorithms are undergirded by a type of anticipatory rationality (Amoore, 2013;Gillespie, 2014;Hong & Szpunar, 2019), aimed at predicting and preempting possible futures. It "separates the individuals from their possibility of not actualizing what they are capable [of], or their possibility of not being subjected to what they are likely to be subjected to" (Rouvroy & Stiegler, 2016, pp.…”

Section: From Instrumental Reason To Algorithmic Rationalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Disenchanting Trust: Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Governance, and China’s Emerging Social Credit System

Zou

2021

MaC

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Digital technologies have provided governments across the world with new tools of political and social control. The development of algorithmic governance in China is particularly alarming, where plans have been released to develop a digital Social Credit System (SCS). Still in an exploratory stage, the SCS, as a collection of national and local pilots, is framed officially as an all-encompassing project aimed at building trust in society through the regulation of both economic and social behaviors. Grounded in the case of China’s SCS, this article interrogates the application of algorithmic rating to expanding areas of everyday life through the lens of the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason. It explores how the SCS reduces the moral and relational dimension of trust in social interactions, and how algorithmic technologies, thriving on a moral economy characterized by impersonality, impede the formation of trust and trustworthiness as moral virtues. The algorithmic rationality underlying the SCS undermines the ontology of relational trust, forecloses its transformative power, and disrupts social and civic interactions that are non-instrumental in nature. Re-reading and extending the Frankfurt School’s theorization on reason and the technological society, especially the works of Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas, this article reflects on the limitations of algorithmic technologies in social governance. A Critical Theory perspective awakens us to the importance of human reflexivity on the use and circumscription of algorithmic rating systems.

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“…Instead, it is an "epistemic black market" through which speculative truth-claims (e.g. he would have) are laundered into actionable facts often in the service of maintaining state control (Hong and Szpunar, 2019).…”

Section: Shall Be: the Memory Politics Of American Exceptionalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory politics in the future tense: Exceptionalism, race, and insurrection in America

Szpunar

2021

Memory Studies

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The grounding myth of American collective memory is built on the idea of America as a promise, what it shall be. Crises place futures in doubt. Against these two considerations, this article examines how the future can be used to shape the past. In the American context, the future as a general promise is invoked in times of crisis to reassure a nation by way of laundering difficult pasts so as to fit a narrative of progress in spite of the continued presence and recursive nature of these pasts. In the immediate wake of the 2021 Capitol Insurrection, another crisis (itself a harbinger of crises to come), the 2000 Bush v Gore decision, was rewritten as an exemplar of American exceptionalism rather than a stain on it. Beyond displaying the intricate relationship between future and past in collective memory, the case highlights how this operation only works to further neglect the racism and unresolved pasts entrenched in the myth of exceptionalism that motivated the Capitol Riot.

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The futures of anticipatory reason: Contingency and speculation in the sting operation

Cited by 8 publications

References 45 publications

Digital Limit Situations

Digital Limit Situations

Disenchanting Trust: Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Governance, and China’s Emerging Social Credit System

Memory politics in the future tense: Exceptionalism, race, and insurrection in America

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