ZeMKI-Members on the 43rd Congress of the German Sociological Association (DGS)
1. October 2026
At the 43rd Congress of the German Sociological Association (DGS) on the topic “Futures of Society,” ZeMKI members Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp and Sandra Kero will deliver two presentations.
Today, Thursday, October 1, at 9 a.m., Andreas Hepp will deliver his German presentation titled “From ‘Quiet’ to ‘Loud’ Futuring: Silicon Valley, Pioneer Communities, and the Cultural Dynamics of Creating AI Futures”:
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, a more in-depth analysis is necessary to grasp the cultural dynamics of AI-related futuring and the inequality and power it rearticulates. In my presentation, I aim to show that Big Tech’s “loud futuring” incorporates the visions of “quiet futuring” from technology-oriented groups in and around Silicon Valley into broader societal imaginaries. Thus, many of today’s AI futures 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 a 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 sociotheoretical 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 in academia and the professional world.
For sociology, this means analyzing the emergence of technology in relation to projections, visions, and imaginaries of futures—and not only once the relevant technologies have had a broad societal impact.
More details on the presentation can be found here.
On Friday, October 2, at 9:00 a.m., Sandra Kero will follow with her presentation “Nostalgic for the World of Tomorrow? Immersive AI Imaginaries of a ‘Past Future’ by Right-Wing Actors”:
The presentation will share the findings of three qualitative studies on the use of AI-generated images in right-wing online communication, which contribute to a metapolitical strategy for constructing idealized societal models and counter-models to progressive orders. The focus is on artificially fictional images that blur the line between ideologically explicit content and visionary visual worlds by combining playful aesthetics with serious messages. What is decisive is not so much the distinction between truth and falsehood as the immersive potential of such imaginations, which contribute to long-term processes of “ideological configuration” (Van Dijk, 2025). The studies are based on AI-generated images with a synthetic aesthetic that were spread by right-wing actors on X and Instagram between October 2023 and June 2025 and evaluated using qualitative content analysis. The goal was to identify the messages conveyed by the content and to reconstruct recurring patterns. The results show how various temporal dimensions are incorporated—often through historical references—to construct alternative pasts and futures and to critique the present. In the process, alternative historical narratives and collective conceptions of memory and the future are constructed; reactionary notions of a “German people” are idealized and fused with transnational narratives of a united West; and gender representations are used as instruments of right-wing “micronormalization.” Digital communication spaces, in particular, enable immersive effects and the creation of alternative, emotionally binding worlds (Kero & Schmitt, 2025). Based on a social and affect-theoretical understanding of immersion (Mühlhoff & Schütz, 2019), it is demonstrated how right-wing actors address nostalgically charged longings for a “somewhere else” that is either lost or imagined as having been dispossessed, and connect these to an “undead past” that is emotionally reconstructed in the sense of a “retrotopia” (Bauman, 2017). AI-generated content expands this potential for immersive imaginings of the future beyond human conception: What was it like, what is it like—and what could it be like?
More details on the presentation can be found here.