Claiming sociodigital futures? Knowledge practices and their consequences

There is currently intense and widespread speculation about the implications of digital technologies for future societies, despite a wealth of evidence that past claims to predict how technology will shape the future have usually failed. Nonetheless, it is now well established that claims to knowledge about how emerging technologies will shape future worlds are performative, exercising powerful effects on the futures they claim to describe. Building on the Sociology of Expectations and work on Sociotechnical Imaginaries, this paper turns attention to the ontological and epistemological ‘nuts’ and ‘bolts’ of claims about digital technologies, social life and the future. We ask: how are these entities and the relations between them constituted and given traction as knowledge practices? Specifically, we explore the practices used by major future-claiming institutional actors in a selection of published documents. We find a strikingly coherent ontological performance of the relations between ‘the digital’, ‘the social’ and ‘the future’ and the circulation of (what comes to count as) knowledge across these institutions. Indeed, what is striking is the re-purposability of these knowledge practices despite the distinctive institutional interests in play. These knowledge practices offer a limited grasp on the futures that are currently in the making. Moreover, they enable the persistence of a latent set of assumptions which are powerful in limiting consideration of critical questions about the future.