Cruel Optimism and Glitches of Infrastructural Futures In the Anthropocene

The green and digital "twin transition" has emerged as one of the dominant political and infrastructural responses to the ecological crises of the Anthropocene; yet the infrastructures it produces raise urgent questions about what kinds of futures are being built, and for whom. AI systems, geoengineering platforms, SMR, and renewable energy networks are increasingly presented not merely as technical solutions but as the horizon of collective hope. This session asks why such infrastructural futures continue to function as compelling objects of desire, even as their material realization reproduces the extractive and ecologically costly relations they promise to overcome.

Drawing on Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, we approach this attachment not as false consciousness but as a structural condition of contemporary Anthropocene politics. Infrastructural futures sustain hope precisely because they promise to resolve the crisis that generates them, making it difficult to relinquish them even when their contradictions become visible. Yet those contradictions do become visible, in what Berlant calls the "glitch": moments of interruption that expose the hidden costs, uneven distributions, and limits of technological optimism. We treat these glitches not simply as failures but as analytically generative sites where the politics of infrastructural promise can be contested, renegotiated, or reimagined.

We invite contributions that trace how ecological promises become embedded in and transformed by the socio-material arrangements that sustain them. What happens to the promise of green transition? And what might the glitches and breakdowns in these arrangements reveal about the conditions under which alternative futures become thinkable?