Prognostic Cultures in the Digital Age. Epistemic and Authoritarian Forms of Governing the Future

Different kinds of future predictive techniques such as scenario analyses and forecasts, roadmaps and predictive policing contribute to an epistemic culture of the present, which is primarily concerned with its potential futures. These futures may be envisioned as socially desirable disruption, driven by technology and leading to human progress, as is the case in what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) called The Californian Ideology. Or they are bound up with proliferating fears of harm and catastrophy, as in sociological analyses criticizing precautionary strategies and the Emergency Imaginary (Calhoun 2004) in general. In any case, these futures are technically constructed, algorithmically calculated and digitally mediated. Their origin is not, like in former times, the disclosure of an eremite, they spring from serverfarms and digital infrastructures. But just like yesterday, envisioning the future implies new systems of social ordering and control as well.

Against this backdrop, the talk sorts contemporary cultures of prognostics using three contrasting, empirical examples. These can be assigned to two ideal types of modelling uncertain futures by data: an authoritarian future as the product of autonomized algorithmic decision-making systems (ADMs) on the one hand, and (referring to the works of Rheinberger and Knorr-Cetina) epistemic futures on the other. The latter appear paradigmatically in two contrasting social arenas: first, as the systematic multiplication of competing futures in financial-economic arbitrage trading (e.g. Beunza and Stark 2005), and second as unattainable futures in the mundane practices of self-measurement/self-tracking (Noji and Vormbusch 2018). The former (ADMs) appear as calculative infrastructures accumulating and synthesizing Data, thereby assigning resources and social positions to people without them having control. The talk contrasts these techniques of producing future knowledge with regard to the opening and closing of attainable futures, the relationship between human and machine knowledge, and the embedded power relations.