A speculative syllabus: from futuristic histories of the digital to designing sustainable digital futures

Description

The term “Digital Futures” has gained popularity within higher education in recent years, as universities seek to develop curricula and research agendas capable of addressing the cultural, economic and environmental impacts of emerging digital technologies, particularly of AI. This paper draws on the authors’ experiences of developing a new postgraduate programme in digital futures, grounded in theories and methods from the humanities. It begins, like our syllabus, by considering histories of the digital future. Perverse as it may seem, we hold that looking back can attune us to the discursive dimensions of futuring, the role of metaphor in shaping sociotechnical imaginaries, and key shifts in the epistemological frames through which the relationship between the present and future is viewed. Here we focus on two frames in particular: optimisation and speculation. Unpacking the logics implicit in these terms, we show how, in concert with discourses of sustainability, smartness and intelligence, they have fostered visions of the digital future which present themselves as being open to contingency while in practice locking us into existing paradigms. We end the paper with some reflections on alternative models of futuring. If studying the digital past, present and future teaches us to be wary of humanist discourses of rational individualism, it also suggests we should be suspicious of the smart systems and machine learning models that we are increasingly expected to delegate agency to. Against both paradigms we call for forms of futuring grounded in embodied collective intelligence, and in collaborative practices and methods of sense-making that acknowledge entanglement without foreclosing possibilities for democratic decision-making.

Period	2024
Event title	Imaginative Digital Futures: a symposium
Event type	Conference
Location	LondonShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International