The limits of the imaginary: Challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory,data,and algorithms

Introduction

the process of “technological change” has become a vast display of social sublimity. Just to invoke “change” seems to justify its fatal inevitability—as if it were all one huge process, as if it justified every project of destruction, as if it came out of nowhere.

This article emerges from ethnographic analysis of a series of public, arts-based participatory interventions called “The Museum of Random Memory” (MoRM). Conducted between 2016 and 2018, MoRM was designed to encourage people to think about the future of their memories in the age of digitalization, automated preservation, and automated or datafied categorization of their personal legacy or larger cultural heritage. A group of researchers (see section “Acknowledgements”) performed eight MoRM workshops and interactive exhibitions in Denmark, Spain, United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy.

Each version of MoRM represents a different experiment ¹ of how scholars as activists can spark “consciousness raising” in the classic sense of feminist consciousness-raising circles in the 1960s (cf. Press, 2017) or what the Brazilian activist educator Paulo Freire (1970 [1968]) called “pedagogy of the oppressed.” The first installation of MoRM (at Counterplay Festival 2016) was located in the open floor plan of the city’s new media space/library. Here, the researchers enacted the role of museum uncurators and asked participants to donate ideas, images, or objects they believed were useless or they wanted to forget. The uncurators conducted professional intake of donor’s artifacts and displayed them in sealed containers during the second day of the festival, as befitting objects of art. The second installation of MoRM (at Counterplay Festival 2017) asked participants to donate visual representations of memories via a web interface, where they could choose degrees of remembering or forgetting on a slider. The third installation of MoRM (at Danish Festival of Research, 2017) did not ask for donations at all, but instead walked visitors through various stations where they could experience various ways digital memory could be lost, automatically curated, distorted, or traded to third parties. The fourth MoRM event at a design museum in Barcelona gave visitors a guided “behind the scenes” tour of the curation process. This tongue-in-cheek tour allowed the visitors to witness a donor giving a memory to a curator, to listen to the story behind the memory. The fifth version of MoRM in a villa in Italy gave visitors a guided tour of physical artifacts that represented memories of former donors and then offered them a one-on-one interaction with the museum curators to donate their memories. This was followed by smaller group discussions about the relationship between digital and physical artifacts, the nature of memory, and the role digitalization and datafication plays in how memories are kept or passed down to future generations. The sixth version of MoRM, subtitled as What is the sound of forgetting? was performed as a sonic installation in two different cities simultaneously. Roving uncurators recorded participants’ audio memories at the 2018 Data Justice conference. Later, participants could listen to their narratives mingling with sounds and stories of forgetting, loss, or deportation from Welsh and Irish national archives, as well as other participants’ stories, as DJs at both locations mixed them into live performances. In the seventh MoRM, we remixed a single video-based memory donation from MoRM #2 into a five-channel video/audio installation for a conference in Aarhus, Denmark. As visitors would walk through the exhibition space, they would see or hear only certain data points from the video file—the text, transcribed through Google’s latest machine learning algorithms, the trace lines from the hand gestures, the voices of the MoRM research team debating the problematic ethics of manipulating a donor’s memory for the purpose of entertaining a new audience, as we were doing here. As viewers moved physically closer to the video in order to hear the donor’s narrative memory, an infrared camera would interact with the viewer’s body heat to distort the image, making it impossible to ever get close to one’s digital memory in its original form, whatever that might be. In the last, eighth version of MoRM in Montreal, we built a shrine to lost data and invited participants to contribute their forgotten memories. A tower of broken hard drives, outdated systems, and seemingly endless piles of floppy drives, cassette tapes, and punch cards dominated the space. We offered a memory recycling station, inviting visitors to both donate a memory and then recycle it to the corporate giant of their choice: Amazon, Google, or Facebook.

While each event was unique, one dominant thread I follow here is that people seem to have difficulty imagining futures in ways that do not reproduce current ideological trends or cede control and power to external, mostly corporate, stakeholders. The power of anticipatory logics and “trajectorism” flowing through everyday discourse around technologies builds and reinforces a hegemonic ideology of external power and control. This analysis presents some of the ways alternative imaginaries are limited through embedded or systemic processes of what critical theorists call discursive closure. More than simply closing off alternatives, these discursive patterns continually strengthen the dominant frames of inevitability and powerlessness.

To keep the article from being a simple repetition of a common refrain about how we are trapped by the limits of our own imagination unable to find radically alternative trajectories for possible futures, I conclude by focusing on how the case study of MoRM highlights the importance of iterative intervention. By continually and reflexively redesigning our patterns of interaction with participants, markedly informed by the principles and practices of critical pedagogy interventions like MoRM, can generate meaningful prompts and models that, in turn, function as more radical scaffolding for people to imagine otherwise.

A brief sketch of the relationship between imaginaries, everyday discourse, and frames

Before discussing the specific case, I briefly review how I am using the term “imaginaries,” a currently popular term that draws a close link between the processes of imagining or speculating and the outcomes of such processes, which we might initially label discourse and later describe as stories, urban legends, myths, “big D” Discourses (grand narratives), or frames. My coverage of the topic of these terms is necessarily glossed, but in essence, the question I ask of the concept of the imaginary is this: Is it possible to radically alter an existing social imaginary? Or is it too tightly bound by the density of its decades- or centuries-old narrative threads?

Most basically, we might think of an imaginary as what emerges as a person speculates about something they do not know, casts into the future, past, or elsewhere than the “right here, right now” to think about what the world or life might be like, was like, or is like in another time/space. The imaginary as a topic has been around for centuries, and philosophers agree that whatever the imaginary is, it is certainly not novel, even though in our everyday nomenclature, the imagination is supposedly where we can think entirely otherwise. Rather, the imaginary is a remix, the temporary outcome of a process of analogy, comparison, and pastiche, borrowing from what is already known or supposed about the world. “Remix” in my conceptualization emphasizes the blurred process/product of the imaginary, aligning with Charles Taylor's (2002) idea that the “imaginary is not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society” (p. 91). It functions in an indefinite way, as background for making sense of what is and what should be (p. 107). The social imaginary is carried in images, stories, and legends and it is shared by large groups of people. As a result, it creates

…a kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice. This understanding is both factual and “normative”; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go…(Taylor, 2002: 106)

In other words, although the capacity for imagining something new or different resides in all of us, the available material for any imaginative act is greatly influenced by prior imaginations. The question a scholar like Rosalind Williams (2008 [1990]) asks is whether anyone can get beyond an existing imaginary of the past or present to truly have a thought adventure that points to something different in the future. The impossibility of getting beyond what we already know is perhaps more pronounced when we try to apply imagination in situations where the stockpile of knowledge is large or long-standing, as Beckert and Bronk (2018) study in the field of economics, noting that for economic and political actors trying to use imaginaries and narratives to coordinate action, “imaginaries are partially formed by the very models used to explore them” (p. 13).

Bringing this discussion back to the topic at hand, and leaning on social constructionist and more specifically symbolic interactionist thinking, the ability to imagine differently about the near or distant possible futures for life with and within digital and data technologies requires first breaking out of a current discursive frame (in the Goffmanian sense ² ) and then creating a new forward trajectory. These moves are hampered by at least two forces: First, the invisibility of the boundaries of our everyday frames for thinking. Like maps, frames orient and guide us. It is not until the map has been turned upside or otherwise disturbed that we notice it was operating on our sensibilities in the first place. Second, the power of trajectorism to create a predetermined narrative arc or more generally, a sense of inevitable continuation. Globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai develops the concept of trajectorism as a lens through which we can articulate predominant thought about social progress. While Appadurai might focus on trajectorism as “the great narrative trap of the west,” Wilson (2017) implies this logic is adopted more broadly, particularly in understanding technology, as “both techno-optimists and techno-pessimists seem to converge in their embracing of this trajectorist logic” (n.p.). I'll return to both concepts later in the analysis.

These logics are powerful but not unbreakable. Historically, there have been moments when paradigms are disrupted or overturned, or gradually, certain elements in the narrative structures change— for example, the use of generic male pronouns has been almost completely removed from commonly spoken English in the United States. So even as certain seemingly immutable logics are built through repeated discursive performance, which can tend to reinforce existing boundaries as the limit of what is possible, it is also in these repetitive elements of narrative where the potential to think otherwise, or as Della Pollock (2005) put it, “ethics and politics of possibility,” remains. (p. 122). It is within this confluence that the MoRM situates itself as a performative critical pedagogy (Markham, 2020; Markham and Pereira, 2019a, 2019b).

Designing interventions to break strong existing frameworks of meaning

Each workshop was designed in a different way but all focused on critically examining digital preservation, personal data, and the future of memory. The design of MoRM was inspired by the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (1970 [1968]), early feminist consciousness-raising circles, and the long-standing feminist practices of speculation fabulation exemplified in the works of feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway, speculative authors like Margaret Atwood, and science fiction writers like Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy, Ann Leckie, or N.K. Jamison. ³ As Harold Garfinkel did in his famous breaching experiments, MoRM encouraged people to defamiliarize themselves with their everyday seamless use of digital technologies. A baseline question operating throughout this series was: How do you imagine your memories will take material shape for future archeologists, who will dig through various data artifacts in 80 years to make historical sense of what happened back in 2017?

We asked this question in many different ways. At each event, multiple researchers performed (played different roles to engage participants into and through the scenes), explained (as curators might), and provoked through various types of questions or prompts. The idea behind all of it was to explore methods for getting people to be both curious and critical about the way their future memories are influenced by digitalization and datafication. Some of the staging was prepared carefully in advance, but we also held a strong stance of being open to transformation and transgression, as part of emergent methods. While enacted differently by each of the researchers—who themselves comprise a diverse and talented group, ⁴ the overall strategy aligns well with the legacies and techniques associated with how American interpretive sociologist Dwight Conquergood conducted and discussed performance ethnography (Conquergood, 1985; also see the work of Barbara Dennis, 2009, in educational settings), how Brazilian critical pedagogue Augusto Boal (1979 [1974]) enacted theater of the oppressed, and how many generative style workshops are conducted in design-related fields (e.g. Sanders, 2013; Sanders and Dandavate, 1999; Soini and Pirinen, 2005).

Workshops varied in size, format, complexity, audience, and levels of participation. The largest had more than 500 participants, the smallest had 10. Events ranged in design from science fair demo booths with high foot traffic to large-scale performative exhibitions in public spaces, to multi-channel video installations at a conference.

In short, the overall strategy for intervention was to invite critical discussions about issues related to digitalization, datafication, and the future of memory making, but very indirectly. We created playful and performative processes for participants to encounter or navigate, hoping they would become more critically conscious of what future imaginaries were operating on their personal sensibilities. This design was developed to meet the not insignificant challenge of breaking frames at discursive and material levels.

The first of the challenges was to help participants identify and critique larger discourses or grand narratives, assuming these everyday working frames would be embedded. While working with the research team to design these workshops, I was drawing on symbolic interactionism, rhetorical theory, and performance studies, including Goffman’s notion of frames, Burke’s terministic screens, Simon’s ideas around bounded technological rationality, Lakoff’s work on the power of metaphors, Gramsci’s writings about hegemony, Giddens’ social theory of structuration, and Judith Butler’s ideas about performativity and repetition. ⁵

A common thread across this interdisciplinary mix helps us understand that a person builds their knowledge about their relationship with technology through a dynamic and ongoing chain of learning moments, including using that technology, watching others, learning from various others how these should be used, and then explaining these possibilities to oneself and others (Orlikowski, 2000). One’s understanding of how technology such as the Internet, social media, or digital platform works grows more concrete over time, through habitual practice (Giddens, 1984) or repeated performance (Butler, 1990).

This same tendency occurs in everyday conversations, as people describe to themselves or explain to others the possibilities and limitations of what a digital platform should be used for. We listen to podcasts, watch advertisements, learn from friends, chat in groups about the failures of this technology or the amazing features of that technology. This chain of rhetoric grows, linking evidence or reasoning that accretes over time and repetition. Whatever we call the outcome—for example, terministic screens, ⁶ technological frames, ⁷ or technological rationality, ⁸ this discursive process enables and facilitates certain ways of defining and making sense of digital platforms or technical devices, obscuring other options.

In MoRM’s design, we asked participants questions about how they imagined their future memories would appear for data archeologists 80 or 100 years from now. This was intended to get people to start down a path of thinking. But based on these theoretical suppositions, we knew their thinking would begin with discourse about what they already knew about this topic. Taking a cue from Goffman’s work on frames, we could anticipate that their initial statements would tell us something about the larger discourse communities in which they were making sense of their everyday lives within an epoch of intensive datafication through digital platforms, mass data archiving, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based infrastructures for data processing. By learning how they currently imagined, we would then, in real time, work dialogically with them to find ways to identify some and critically examine some of these taken-for-granted frames of reference.

The second challenge was to help participants connect their flows of communication or ephemeral-seeming information to the materiality of digital technologies. One of the questions we commonly asked MoRM participants was “Where do you store your photos?” Some participants would respond quickly, “on my phone” but then add “—or in the cloud.” When pressed, many did not know what “the cloud” meant, precisely. They described it as many things, including the company that made the device they were referencing, the browser, the Internet, the web, a website, a platform, the app, or a server. This is not to emphasize that people have only a rudimentary understanding of the infrastructures behind the surface of their device. To an extent, we all do. Rather, it points out just how difficult it is to identify, comprehend, and then critically reflect on the material elements of multiple suprastructures that help us accomplish everyday activities.

Another way to think of this is through the long legacy of ideas in philosophy, psychology, and sociology that teach us how structure, and thereby culture, is habit writ large. The first time I uploaded a photo to some sort of cloud storage, I created a pathway that did not previously exist. Over time and use, that pathway became a habitual way of storing photos. And then the pathway itself—or the process—disappeared. The system learns from my actions what my preferred action is, at least for this moment in time. The guidance disappears soon thereafter, after the handful of times I must choose to upload a photo in this same way. Do the default protocols shift? Or do I stop noticing? Both. At some point, whether through the habit of my haptic motions on the device or the update of default settings by the device, I no longer choose to save or upload the photo in this way. It just happens. The affordance disappears, at least as a directly visible invitation to act. Instead, it becomes an imagined affordance (Nagy and Neff, 2015), part of my belief system about how photos get saved.

My agency does not disappear, but because the recursive technical accomplishment of the relationship is invisible, buried beneath the seamless accomplishment of a goal, the process is conflated with the product. We might as well say that photos have always been saved in the cloud (or wherever). It is just a material fact. After a while, I simply take it for granted and the path, then, determines my action and direction. This is a good thing, since it means we do not have to attend to or learn to ignore all the processes behind our digital media use. But as they are invisibilized, so too are the pathways, and the knowledge of the process. In recent decades, scholars reference this through Mark Weiser’s (1991) ideas about ubiquitous computing.

This invisibility—and its influence on our ability to speculate or imagine beyond what we already know—is more striking when we compare it a completely different scenario. Say I always take the same walking path to work. As I walk across the hillside, I can literally see different options for how to cross the terrain. The convenience and comfort of staying on the path might keep me in this routine, and over time I might no longer notice that I never stray from the path, but always, the option to act otherwise, to make a different choice, remains visible.

Our research design included iterative and continuously changing modes of questioning, to try to find ways to spark curiosity, which would lead to further interrogation about some of these obscured discursive and material frames. ⁹ Much of this design could be described within contemporary speculative traditions. Donna Haraway is well known for her conceptual work in this area. She uses the general acronym SF to indicate various forms of speculative future making. Both Speculative Fabulation and Science Fiction ¹⁰ take a “what if?” perspective to play out scenarios, string out possible trajectories, imagine plausible or implausible characteristics of relationships, entities, and social formations. The imaginaries of interest for MoRM are not the grand visions of futurists, professional writers, or pundits. Rather, these are everyday imaginaries regular people in digitally saturated societies might employ to think about “What could it be like if…?” or “What is possible?”

There’s a strong history of exploring how everyday conversations can yield individual or collective imaginaries that function as a form of resistance against hegemonic forces. In the 1960s, Robert Jungk and Norbert Mullert developed the Future Workshops in Germany to help regular people imagine how their future lives and works could look, with the goal of influencing these outcomes. ¹¹ Parallel efforts occurred in South America, where Paulo Freire and, later, Augusto Boal experimented with forms of participatory action research to engage citizens in critical consciousness and social and political critique. These critical pedagogy legacies provide inspiration for contemporary efforts to use art- or design-based workshop formats to test different approaches to speculative thinking and imagining alternative histories or futures.

Contemporary researchers continue to develop creative workshops to explore how speculative fabulation works to help people imagine alternatively. In the Making Futures workshop at the 2012 Participatory Design Conference, for example, participants used mapping and storytelling to “form landscapes of multiple futures” with the intent of challenging innovation. In one of the World Machines workshop series by Ann Light (2015–2017), participants were given historical counterfactuals to prompt artifacts or storylines that reflected this alternate historical timeline.

These types of workshops are designed to help participants think otherwise, to build creative imaginaries, and to challenge the rhetoric of existing technological trends, creatively consider the situated heterogeneity of “futures in the making” (Ehn et al., 2014), or consider how any act of design is an act of world building, enacting particular realities in lieu of other alternatives (Light, et al., 2015: 83).

Emerging themes of inevitability

On the surface of our interactions with participants, we operated in a fairly open-ended manner, asking people of various ages and walks of life to think about “What is going on here?” in relation to the digital character of their memories, by focusing on how data are being formulated, stored, and fed back to them through various platforms and digital service infrastructures. This question (What is going on here?) was not stated as much as it is provoked, which means essentially that we want participants to raise the question themselves.

Of course, this more open-ended goal was accompanied by an interventionist, critical pedagogy goal, inspired by other, more loaded questions, such as, “Shouldn’t we be more engaged in actively creating rather than simply accepting the future?” or relatedly, “How do our everyday mundane and seemingly banal activities with digital media might be actively creating future boxes that later people will have to think outside of?”

The participants’ comments and stories exemplify and verify much of what Internet researchers have been finding for 25 years: infrastructural processes are largely invisible; ¹² affordances (technological, perceived, or imagined) invite and inhibit certain actions; ¹³ storage, memory, and retrieval seem to be conceptually conflated; ¹⁴ trust in the technological durability of device is strong; and there’s an overall expectation that platforms collect and sell personal data. ¹⁵

In my analysis ¹⁶ of materials generated through these experiments, I expected there to be a lot of speculative imagination throughout these conversations, especially since many of our prompts were built in a way to foster, as well as use, speculative fabulation. And one could say it did work, after a fashion: once the placid surfaces of everyday interfaces were broken through, participants immediately began to think more critically about how platforms or AI actually operate. Yet, it also seemed to fail: even as they reached into the black box, most participants did not offer alternatives, so the critical consciousness seemed to stall. For me, this raised an immediate question: Why do everyday understandings of sociotechnical relations seem locked within a narrative paradigm that the current projected future is inevitable and unchangeable?

Simplification is expected as people grapple with complexity presented by multiple interactants—platform affordances, norms of use, corporate discourse, advertising, algorithmic parameters of code, and common depictions about how tech works. Simplification is also expected when people do not think much about what is happening under the surface, but simply use the device and enjoy its various conveniences.

In conversations, participants often commented that when it comes to the future of their memories in the digital age, “I never really thought about it.” When they did think about the information they uploaded and stored on their devices, on platforms, or in the cloud, whether this be photos, contact information, or records of conversations, many articulated they just expected the technology to work properly and admitted they would encounter a major problem if they lost the device or it did not work as expected. Often this was expressed in humorous exaggeration and self-deprecation, in statements like, “I don’t know how I would survive without the Internet” and “I’d be screwed if ever I lost my phone. I wouldn’t be able to even call my mom because I don’t have any idea what her number is.”

Others would cock their heads at our questions, find themselves at a loss for words. Many times, I watched people simply pull out their phone, look at it, and then look back at me. In conversation over several such encounters, I learned that the question was simply not on their radar. They would later tell me they took for granted that what they sent, received, or saved was either kept (automatically archived by the device or if on social media, the company that owned the platform) or discarded (automatically deleted by an app like Snapchat or manually deleted). Their surprise highlights Wendy Chun’s (2011) argument that logics of programming build axiomatic loops whereby data storage is conflated with memory as always already there. It also indicates a strong faith in the persistence of data formats. It is taken for granted that some feature in the system—known or otherwise, will not only store all data one might find relevant now and in the future, but will also retrieve data when needed, packaging it in a sensible way (transforming it from data to information) for whoever wants/needs this information.

Less expected was the theme of inevitability, where alternatives to the status quo seemed unimaginable. Or if a radically different path was imagined, it was dismissed almost immediately as not probable. This was much more tacit and assumed than uttered, although at times it would be expressed as

It’s just the way Facebook [fill in the blank platform here] works. Well, it’s not like we can change Facebook, right?

This raised a second question: How might interventions like MoRM help push against the limits of the public imagination to think in truly alternative ways about their own futures? This became a topic for greater intervention in the final two exhibitions, which I return to in the conclusion of this article.

But first, I turn to discuss the critical implications of this theme of inevitability. Using concepts from social study of science and technology (STS), symbolic interactionism, and critical organization studies, I offer a reading of the situation as “discursive closure,” (Deetz, 1992; Leonardi and Jackson, 2004; Markham, 2005). This is a useful heuristic through which we can see how certain values are maintained hegemonically by creating surface-level sensibilities that, through a process of systematically distorted communication (Habermas, 1970, 1984), shut down alternatives.

Discursive closure

Discursive closure is a term drawn from Habermas’ (1970) notion of systematically distorted communication. As reworked in the 1990s by critical organizational theorist Stanley Deetz (1992), the concept is useful in depicting how certain types of communication practices shut down or close off options for thinking otherwise. Discursive closure focuses on how certain patterns of thought, talk, actions, or interactions tend to function like negative feedback loops in social ecologies, discouraging evolution and change. Focusing on how discourses are normalized or locked into repetitive loops helps specify how hegemony works in everyday practices. In systems of highly effective oppression or, what Gramsci labeled “control through consent,” people shut down alternatives themselves, naturalizing problems as “just the way things are.” Certain practices or technological designs are thus removed from any chains of causality or results of decision-making, so that they seem like processes that just exist. Thus neutralized, they become value-free routines or routine ways of thinking, removing both agency and the origin point.

Below, I describe four (of many possible) types of discursive closure to specify and detail how the expressions of inevitability shut off possibilities for alternate imaginaries for MoRM participants.

Technological determinism and other binaries

Well, now that we live in filter bubbles…

Relationships between humans and technology are often depicted as being strongly deterministic. The people we have talked with have access to endless streams of discourses—through corporate advertising, popularized science fiction films, series, books and podcasts, and conversations with friends about digital media—that imagine no alternative but a future where data collection is totalizing, where decisions are increasingly automated, and where humans continue to merge with machines. When not dystopian, the narratives (especially for White people with access and disposable income) promise utopian benefits as personalization (only seeing content I love), convenience (finding my way around, automating services), and safety (predictive policing).

Technological determinism, a concept long denigrated ¹⁷ by scholars studying the complexities or social shaping of sociotechnical contexts, remains a common, everyday tool of sensemaking, forging a particular type of relationship between humans and the future of tech. This relationship, simply put, is one of unequal control, where technology has the upper hand in determining our futures. This expressed belief or everyday explanation is augmented by the added utopian or dystopian binary.

The conversations emerging in MoRM highlighted this, as participants commonly invoked generalized grand narratives depicting utopian or dystopian futures led by the untouchable figure of technology to explain their own lives as well as the near and distant future of (their) society. Our efforts to keep pushing participants toward more nuanced understandings of the complexities of any situation were overridden by a strong thread that we simply cannot intervene in the face of technology’s progress. And by “we,” the participants referenced variously individual persons, general citizens, or humans. Across multiple workshop/exhibitions, I began to see this as a dominant pattern of sensemaking.

There might be some direct reference, as when someone would say, “Social media has radically changed us,” but for the most part, a technological determinist frame was referenced indirectly. This aligns well with Dafoe’s (2015) point that overly deterministic explanations tend to be used when discussing the future vaguely or at the macro level (p. 1058). Accordingly, once we could discuss the micro-level details of everyday technology use and decision-making, participants would readily acknowledge that technologies are socially shaped, and articulate how they could hack, alter, or otherwise influence the technologies they regularly use. Still, a running default of helpless accommodation to the technology runs throughout the conversations. When someone says, for example, “Well, now that we live in filter bubbles…” there is an understated claim that polarized news feeds are now natural parts of the larger social and media ecology. These explanations are often accompanied by a statement that there is nothing to be done about it, or no way to resist. This encapsulates how MoRM participants described what life, experience, memory, or society is. Here, then, technological determinism is not simply an everyday explanation but a pattern of discursive closure. Alternatives are limited as we repeatedly tell ourselves and others that we have no control.

Either this or that: the power of the “false dilemma”

I know I shouldn’t store all my photos on Facebook. I could stop using FB. But then where would I find my friends? I would be completely left out.

These statements—and more below, by different participants—represent the sort of thing I heard repeatedly in the past three years of MoRM. They all represent what logicians call the fallacy of “false dilemma” or “false alternatives.” As a solution to a problem, two alternatives are given, and it is presumed that these are the only two possible solutions. George W. Bush famously used this in his war on terror, saying to the world, “You’re either with us or against us.” Damer (2008) clarifies further that a false alternative either “[oversimplifies] a problem situation by virtue of a failure to entertain or recognize all of its plausible alternative solutions, or [places] a limitation on the number of alternative responses that is too small” (p. 143).

This false dilemma logic can function powerfully to privilege certain interests. Take the early 2019 example provided by Mark Zuckerberg’s response to widespread criticism that Facebook engages in dubious data collection practices, sells personal data to third parties, and does not adequately protect user privacy. When describing the problem on 6 March 2019 message, Zuckerberg writes,

Over the last 15 years, Facebook and Instagram have helped people connect with friends, communities, and interests in the digital equivalent of a town square. But people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room. As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms. (6 March, on facebook.com)

Offering this either/or choice can function discursively to close off third, fourth, or fifth options. This is clear in the sorts of statements I offer above. The first person says that friends are either on Facebook or nowhere; that friends are either found because they are on Facebook or hidden. The second person is effectively arguing that either you can let your personal data be collected without restriction or amazing bio-technological possibilities will be thwarted. Both of these statements become ridiculous when broken down to reveal the illogical formations of the ideas, which is not an indictment of the participants in MoRM, but a comment on a very common discursive pattern that treats contraries (opposing ideas that have gradations between their extremes, like hot/cold) as contradictories (opposites that have no gradation, when something is framed as either right or wrong). The effect of repeatedly using “either or” logic is that it can function discursively to close off third, fourth, or fifth plausible alternatives.

Disqualification

Another way that alternatives can be quelled before they are even raised is through discourse that persuades people to believe they are not qualified to enter the conversation. This form of discourse can be directly observed in statements like “you’re too young to know,” or “you should know this already because you’re a digital native!” More subtly, disqualification is built into imaginaries about expertise. Deetz (1990) writes, “[s]ocially produced notions of expertise, professional qualification, and specialization are central to qualification and in the imposition of the opposite, the disqualification processes” (p. 235). He continues, “Expertise functions as an ideological fiction, an imaginary relation, and further reproduces itself by proclaiming who has the capacity to determine and question it.”

When it comes to digital technologies, especially those we might imagine in some future world, most of us do not believe our viewpoint is qualified:

I don’t know enough about how it works

Tech companies benefit from the “black boxing” of algorithms. Whether deliberate or not, the disqualification of the general public functions strategically to sustain the power of small groups of stakeholders in determining how our social interactions and streaming habits “should” work. But on an everyday level, this black boxing enables everyone to avoid thinking too much about the complicated infrastructures operating under the surface. The tasks of creating the infrastructure are left in the hands of the experts. This also removes agency from the situation, whereby the technologies themselves are unknowable.

The momentum of anticipation or trajectorism

We can’t go back to the days before data collection. That would be like trying to burn all the books and the printing press, too. We might as well just go forward and embrace the benefits of how data can make our lives better.

In MoRM, it seemed that anticipation about what the future will be limited participants’ ability to think about what it could be. This was often expressed in resigned terms, like “there’s nothing to be done,” “it will happen anyway, so I might as well not bother.”

Anticipation carries a logic of momentum and inevitability. Considering anticipation as a foundation to both imagination and aspiration, Appadurai (2013) articulates that anticipation functions within an ethic of probability rather than an ethic of possibility. When we see a row of dominos, we anticipate them tumbling down in order, unless something goes wrong. The outcome is probabilistic, and in the case of dominos (or slot machines, or social networking sites), the way the game is played is not determined by chance but by design (cf. Natasha Dow Schüll, 2012).

When it comes to imagining different futures, Guyer (2007) suggests that what makes people unable to shift from one trajectory to another is perhaps that the ideas are simply “reconfigurations of elements that are well-known already” (p. 416). In other words, once we imagine the dominos falling, we cannot unsee the domino effect. The future outcome is a matter of probability and if the past and present continue on the same track, the outcome can be anticipated. Gamblers keep pushing the button, waiting for their moment. The red dot notifications on the front screens of our smartphones invite us back into the app. Anticipation contains its own momentum and, in many ways, this means that people simply follow rather than reinvent the trajectory.

That a trajectory is actually a loop is no surprise to anyone remotely interested in history, which provides example after example of the power of trajectorism. Storylines are repeated because history repeats itself. Campbell’s work traces the lineage of contemporary myths far enough back in time to see traces of the same myths chipped in stone. Rosalind Williams (2008 [1990]) remarks that the narratives about the future of humanity have such similar structures, they could seem all the same (p. 19). This is not to say all storylines follow the same narrative arc, but that whatever the arc, it is repetitive.

Some suggest it is possible to escape these arcs. Williams offers a strong case that narrative “can move in directions that the writer did not foresee” and potentially “opens up unexpected and perhaps unintended possibilities” (p. 19). Even so, there is enormous power of the storyline of a unidirectional flow in contemporary technology development. Focusing on the power of anticipatory logics in the era of big data and predictive computing, Appadurai (2013: 298) describes this as an overwhelming “avalanche of numbers” (p. 298), which fosters a sensibility that the future is already there, waiting along a trajectory strengthened by probability. This, in Appadurai’s (2013) larger argument, is the trap of trajectorism, whereby the power of probability and probabilistic thinking leaves little room for imagining radically different possible futures. We found strong and repetitive evidence of this in how people would interpret their imagined trajectories.

Discursive closure, hegemony, and deep structure power

The four themes above do not distinguish deliberate from accidental acts of closure. When power is direct or strategic, we might witness deliberate construction of coercive systems and production of messages that are intended to be highly persuasive or manipulative. We can also see more “soft conditioning,” whereby the coercion is subtler. On the other hand, when ideologies become part of the taken-for-granted infrastructures or institutionalized through organizational and cultural norms, power is more distributed. At this point, ideologies embedded in everyday discourses, materialities, and infrastructures function to self-regenerate. Power becomes hegemonic because both the control mechanisms and the ideologies are invisible, naturalized, and then neutralized. Henceforth, the origin of power is not nearly as relevant as its function. As Gross (2010) writes, “[i]t is the pervasiveness of hegemonic regimes, so deeply embedded and variously expressed in social, political, economic, and cultural institutions” that makes change so difficult (p. 341).

The theme of inevitability is an embedded and invisible ideology of technological determinism. It takes a different shape than when Marshall McLuhan was telling us the medium is the message. This continuously repeated mantra of powerlessness to avoid what is inevitable is not just something we invent; it is learned (or taught) in micro doses through our news feeds. The power of this discourse operates not only on the surface of everyday talk about such matters but at what those of us in critical organizational communication call deep structure levels of discourse (e.g. Mumby, 1988). It can also be a hidden curriculum, as Duffy and Chan (2019) aptly note, buried in the material functioning of the interfaces themselves as well as the imagined affordances we are building into their features.

This theme of inevitability teaches us that our present and possible futures are being determined by technology. The future world is likely to be dystopian, but we do not really have a choice, since it is an either/or proposition: We are either connected to social media or we do not exist. At least as expressed for the past 3 years by dozens of participants in MoRM, technology development is on a trajectory that cannot stop. Within this overarching imaginary, people should expect more and more encapsulation into black boxed algorithmic systems that may not work perfectly or represent us well. The momentum is carried and controlled by the technology itself, since individuals are disqualified from critically analyzing them (after all, even the programmers of algorithms cannot comprehend exactly how they work).

Inevitability and powerlessness are deeply connected to the concept or perception of control. Participants had different ways of embracing or dismissing the presence of technologies that control how we operate or communicate on a daily basis. But throughout the MoRM workshops, the overall trend was to connect the concept of control with two other concepts: neutralization and naturalization. Naturalization occurs when we accept current elements of sociotechnical contexts as simply “just the way it is.” Even a 3-meter scroll of the MoRM Terms of Services (TOS) (copied from a prominent social networking company in 2-point font) did not shock many people, since they were quite familiar with the need to simply agree to terms they had no intention of reading, even if it were easy enough to comprehend. Not one of the hundreds of participants we interacted with failed to sign our TOS.

Over time, the naturalization of objects, processes, or systems also neutralizes them. While Star and Bowker would detail this as “infrastructuring,” critical communication theorists would focus on the control or hegemonic power that can emerge from a habitual practice of perceiving or responding such elements of the lifeworld as if they are value-free. Through MoRM, we can see how the naturalization process removes agency from all parties, human or not, effectively making it impossible to assign responsibility, blame, or accountability. This neutralization extends broadly to all aspects of the technical interface, the companies behind these, and the people using these capabilities. Rather than assessing how this understanding of control as external to the self is developed ideologically, we can use it as a lens through which to trace whose interests are maintained. We can ask: Who benefits the most from widespread narrative that the digital revolution is upon us, digital futures are inevitable, and there is no way to stop, reconsider, or rethink the current configurations?

Self-regulation and the limits of the imagination

Everyday discursive practices and materialities are powerful not just because they have remarkable potential to persuade others to think and act differently, but also because they operate in such unremarkable ways. Most of us do not recognize that we are shaping social structures when we go about the business of everyday life.

One way to think about my analysis is that it questions the power of Speculative Fiction/Fabulation/Design to actually change how people think. Especially in the current “boom” (Gilbert, 2018) of speculative writing and speculative methodologies, SF is supposed to offer ways of making different analogical connections or metaphorical juxtapositions. SF encourages strange pairings of concepts that normally would not go together, but which may yield productive thinking otherwise. SF also enables us to play with counterfactuals, where we take something that is contrary to what we believe is a fact and allow this to be fertile ground for speculating about different trajectories that got us here, or different possible social configurations as a consequence of this alternate reality.

SF can function as a warning, as we see in the Netflix series Black Mirror, with its overt focus on dystopian possible futures. Indeed, SF is rarely utopian, especially when focused on our relationship with technology. Take the classic literary figures of the Golem and Frankenstein. Both are created by humans to help, both are scary, can be monstrous. The Golem protects. Frankenstein’s monster does too, after a fashion, but as with most pairings of humans and tech, things go awry. We see this trope repeatedly: The Borg are a hive mind that sucks away the individuality of the human. AI is a good idea until the singularity happens. The machines pass the Turing test. After doing all the calculations, the machine decides that the humans should die.

Despite the overly dystopic tendencies in current SF, it stands as a powerful and compelling form of “mental time travel” (Suddendorf, 2013: 90). But if our mental time travel is locked into a distortion loop of contemporary grand narratives, repeated every time we follow a news story on Twitter, stream a new series on Netflix, get caught up in the promise of the latest new tech development, or otherwise consume another cultural unit of information, nuance is difficult to find. The storylines are easily restricted to particular trajectories with particular explanations and limitations of what is probable or possible.

Importantly, to understand the characteristics of the speculative process, the image we should hold in our minds is not that of a straight-line trajectory but a loop. Trajectorism can be usefully depicted as a pattern of negative feedback in a social cybernetic system, through which there is a lot of recycling and repetition of already-established patterns. In a small but important reflection on procedurality, Bolter lays out how event loops get built into our thinking through video games. Combined with both Wendy Chun’s (2011) analysis of loops and Safiya Noble’s (2018) in-depth analysis of how racism is reinforced through algorithmic “clarification,” we can see how these loops foster internal maintenance and reproduction of the system while limiting interaction with the external environment, thus minimizing or preventing adaptation or ecological change.

If we follow the logic of cyberneticist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972), the reproduction of the same pattern over and over can create situations he would describe as pathological. Of course, the situations are not always dire, so we would not necessarily describe the situation as pathological. We might just describe it as not very imaginative, or “conservative innovation.” Even a discourse that is decidedly speculative can be trapped in loops that close off alternative discourse even as they seem to open up the possibility for thinking otherwise. Black Mirror, for example, follows the same dystopian arc, over and over again, which never transgresses its own boundaries.

The strength of the self-regulating system marks a transition from the “agency” to the “structure” end of the structuration cycle. At that point, Giddens would argue, the imaginaries that are used—to make sense of anomalies, uncertainties, or simply new media in society—operate within existing meaning structures, or frames. Deetz (1992) elaborates the ways our mundane, everyday interactions can strengthen this process of amplification, by naturalizing and neutralizing certain relations between humans and technology, building from the Habermas (1970, 1984) notion of “systematically distorted communication.”

While not using the concept of “systematically distorted communication” in their study of the intricacies of search engines, Nissenbaum and Introna (2000) illustrate how the learned responses of the algorithms function to both amplify and reify particular search terms, while obscuring or ignoring other possibilities. Now, we take for granted that this is just the way social media platforms and search engines work, which demonstrates the power of discursive closure.

This is not to say we are unaware that this is happening. As Gerrard and Gillespie (2019) note, recommendation systems, optimized to keep people clicking in the platform, feed users content they “might love” without discrimination. Whether it is self-harm, misinformation, terrorist recruitment, or conspiracy, platforms do more than make this content easily found—in important ways they help amplify it. They emphasize that when this content is not something you necessarily want to see, “[s]ocial media accounts can quickly become funhouse mirrors, not just reflecting your mental health back to you, but amplifying and distorting it” (n.p.).

Conclusion

Future making is not always an act of storytelling. It is more often buried in the mundane, as the quote by Laura Watts (2015) at the outset of this article mentions. Considering these mundane activities from the lens of communication studies, as this article essentially does, enables us to consider how through these discourses, people are engaged in the processes of world-making (Markham, 2015).

As MoRM illustrates, we may be in a loop whereby any future world we imagine seems externally determined. This aligns well with Sally Wyatt’s (2008) point that technological determinism, as much as we might dismiss it intellectually, remains a strong common sense frame for people to interpret the relations between humans and their tech. Added to this, these worlds are already here, and, as the quote by Rosalind Williams at the outset of this article suggests, unchangeable.

However, and this is a less cynical conclusion, critical pedagogues have always faced dismal conditions. Intervention is built out of need. As critical communication scholar Dennis Mumby (1993) notes, narratives, grand or otherwise, do not function monolithically, which is why societies are characterized by ongoing struggles over meaning (p. 6). Giddens (1984) is also clear in his reminder that people are not mere pawns, without any ability to act otherwise. This is the agency side of the structuration cycle.

As new versions of MoRM continue, researchers are now working out how to be more direct in these interventions, by exploring more fully what is felt as critical and urgently needed by particular audiences. This shifts us from general to more targeted groups, and from modes of engagement that sponsor general curiosity to more short-term actionable goals, using techniques akin to persuasion and activism. The aim is still to raise critical consciousness through playful engagement, but recently, we are turning to the concept of aspiration rather than simply speculation.

In his conclusion to Future as a Cultural Fact, Arjun Appadurai discusses anticipation, aspiration, and imagination as three pillars of future making. About aspiration, he writes “we need to see the capacity to aspire as a social and collective capacity without which words such as ‘empowerment,’ ‘voice,’ and ‘participation’ cannot be meaningful” (Appadurai, 2013: 289). Aspiration functions as a navigational tool, through which people can chart their way out of a position of entrapment. Aspiration carries hope, which Appadurai says “is the political counterpart of the work of the imagination” (p. 293).

As we continue with our MoRM and other future-making workshops, we are thinking about how to combine more direct critique of current trajectories with collaborative and performative (cf. Pollock, 2005) world-building exercises. This is based on the idea that people can act more as researchers of their own lived experience. They can build a strong practice of SF for themselves, studying what is underneath the everyday actions of making things work in their own everyday lives and careers. In this way, we hope to facilitate the possibilities that people feel more qualified to themselves intervene in creative ways to think about how they might confront the powerlessness of the frame of inevitability.