Digital Futures in the Making Ethnographies of Anticipation, Infrastructures, and the Politics of Everyday Life

0. Introduction: Digital futures in the making: Temporalities Gertraud Koch, Samantha Lutz, Anna Oechslen, Quoc-Tan Tran

Part One: Imaginaries Futures in the making: Sociotechnical imaginaries in technological development

1. Digital future-making in the military: Imaginaries, nostalgia, and disillusionment Sofie van der Maarel

2. Politics of the unpolitical: Authoritarian futures in the making? Emilian Franco

3. Imagining and infrastructuring desirable futures with humans in the loop. Human Computation and Hybrid Intelligence as counter-imaginaries to artificial general intelligence Libuše Hannah Vepřek

4. Sociotechnical imaginaries of the museum: Conversational agents and visitor engagement Cassandra Kist

5. Transmitting tradition in a ‘once-in-a-generation’ festival. Digital memory and the future of the Fête des Vignerons Tatiana Smirnova, Nicolas Baya-Laffite, Dominique Vinck

Part Two: Materialities Materialising futures: intra-actions with/of digital infrastructures

6. The material side of digital evolution: On rhythms and relations of innovation making in the woodworking crafts Sarah May

7. Tablets, tutors, table charts. On digital technologies and future-making in the classroom Nadine Wagener-Böck

8. Making futures material: Screenshotting mental therapy chatbots’ transactional exchanges as matters of care Renée Ridgway

Part Three: Politics and Ethics Negotiating digital futures: Politics of technology and regimes of living

9. A Matter of Pace: Contesting digital futures through boredom and disconnection Hannah Kanz

10. The role of (research) ethics in applied artificial intelligence applications research Susanne Draheim

Epilogue

11. The digital future is ‘electric blue’ – On brainrot and how (not) to get stuck in the aesthetics of the interface Christian Ulrik Andersen

Biography

Samantha Lutz is a cultural anthropologist affiliated with the Institute for Anthropological Studies in Culture and History, University of Hamburg, Germany.

Anna Oechslen is a cultural anthropologist. She works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner, Germany.

Quoc-Tan Tran is a cultural anthropologist. He works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Studies of Science at Bielefeld University, Germany.

Gertraud Koch is Professor of Anthropological Studies in Culture and History at the University of Hamburg, Germany