About the talk
Where do Silicon Valley’s visions of the AI future come from? A superficial answer to this question is: from “Big Tech” and the “Tech Bros”. However, to grasp the cultural dynamics of AI-related futuring and the inequality and power it rearticulates, a more in-depth analysis is necessary. In my talk, I would like to show that Big Tech’s “loud futuring” incorporates the visions of “quiet futuring” by technology-oriented groupings in and around Silicon Valley into broader societal imaginaries. Thus, many of the current visions of AI’s future stem from the Whole Earth Network, Effective Altruism, and other pioneer communities. Drawing on an ethnographic study comprising 321 interviews as well as analyses of the Silicon Valley Archives, I trace these cultural dynamics and discuss their theoretical significance.
The presentation is divided into three parts. In the first, I examine the dynamics of “quiet” and “loud futuring”: I show to what extent the future visions of pioneer communities serve as a fundamental resource for Big Tech’s “loud futuring”—and how Big Tech, at the same time, provides the framework for the future discourse of pioneer communities. In the second part, I reconstruct AI-related visions of the future spanning three generations: from “cybernetic futures” (futures of self-organizing society) through “agile futures” (futures of digital agile capitalism) to contemporary “slippery futures,” in which techno-solutionism and existential threat converge. The third part offers a socio-theoretical reflection: the unprecedented concentration of capital accelerates the implementation of certain visions of the future, and the attribution of agency to AI transforms knowledge practices both in society.
For critical media and communication studies, this highlights the need to analyze the emergence of technology in relation to projections, visions, and imaginaries of the future—rather than waiting until the technologies in question have a broad societal impact.
About Andreas Hepp
Dr Andreas Hepp is Professor of Media and Communications and Head of ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen, Germany, and co-spokesperson of the Research Unit 5656 “Communicative AI”. He was Visiting Researcher and Professor at leading institutions such as the London School of Economics and Political Science, Goldsmiths University of London, Université Paris II Panthéon ASSAS, Stanford University and others.
His research focuses on mediatization, datafication, automation of communication, artificial intelligence, media use and appropriation. He is the author of 14 monographs including “The Mediated Construction of Reality” (with Nick Couldry, 2017), “Transcultural Communication” (2015) and “Cultures of Mediatization” (2013) and “Deep Mediatization” (2020). His latest book is “Pioneer Communities: How our Digital Futures Emerge in Silicon Valley and Beyond” (2026).
For more information, visit andreas-hepp.name.
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