DigiKomm 2026
Utopias and dystopias of the digital society:
30 years of research on computer-mediated communication
September 16–18, 2026, Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin, Germany
Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Session 11 (EN): Pasts and Futures of the Digital Location: Main hall Session Chair: Christian Strippel | |
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Challenging singular(ity) futures: a queer critique of dominant visions for AI futures University of Salford, United Kingdom Contemporary AI is far more than a technology: it is a political economy, an ideology, and an orchestration of power, drawing from a vision for the future animated by the Big Tech notion of “singularity,” which sees artificial omniscience/general intelligence (AGI) as the end goal of AI development. This paper describes the “singularity vision of the future” from the point of view of queer utopian thought (Muñoz, 2019), with a focus not on the AI companies or developers, but on the algorithmic and mathematical architectures of deep learning models. It shows that the central driving force behind singularity futures is the maniacal pursuit of scale, which is regarded as both necessary and sufficient for reaching a deified, transcendental, and omniscient AGI. Finally, the paper delineates how singularity destroys queer visions for social relations. Ultimately, contemporary algorithmic structures are already producing nightmarish futures in the present and undercutting potential queer horizons. | |
