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Thursday, September 1, 2022

Prediction mania as a magical attempt to foreclose on the future

Abstract of the linked article:

Modernity held sacred the aspirational formula of the open future: a promise of human determination that doubles as an injunction to control. Today, the banner of this plannable future is borne by technology. Allegedly impersonal, neutral, and exempt from disillusionment with ideology, belief in technological change saturates the present horizon of historical futures. Yet I argue that this is exactly how today’s technofutures enact a hegemony of closure and sameness. In particular, the growing emphasis on prediction as AI’s skeleton key to all social problems constitutes what religious studies calls cosmograms: universalizing models that govern how facts and values relate to each other, providing a common and normative point of reference. In a predictive paradigm, social problems are made conceivable only as objects of calculative control—control that can never be fulfilled but that persists as an eternally deferred and recycled horizon. I show how this technofuture is maintained not so much by producing literally accurate predictions of future events but through ritualized demonstrations of predictive time.

1 comment:

  1. Odd read.

    'Horizon' its sense is almost back to front.

    Although the problem of the horizon is referenced as drawn from the sense from Niklas Luhmann, “The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society

    Title makes more sense, 'historical horizon' retrospective selection the point at which history is determined to begin (and prophecy will unfold).

    '573 the battle of Ardyrdd (and Merlin fled insane into the woods)

    I presume its positing a change from mediaeval sense of time, really requires digging in to the bibliography to make sense (I hope).

    Bibliography looks interesting.

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