Emerging technologies are often accompanied by catastrophic predictions about their likely effects (Winner, 1984). In the 1970s, scientists worried that recombinant DNA research might expose humanity to carcinogenic bacteria; in the 1980s, scientists feared that self-replicating nano-factories could turn the earth into formless ‘gray goo’; in the early 2000s, advances in Synthetic biology raised concerns about terrorists ordering smallpox in the mail; and in the 2010s, fears were raised that artificial intelligence might turn us all into paperclips. So far, however, none of these harms has come to fruition. Despite this poor track record of predictions, catastrophic narratives continue to play an important role in the governance of emerging technology. A role that imposes substantial costs on society. The main contribution of this paper is to extract from this history epistemic practices that explain the recurrence of catastrophic narratives and the limitations of existing proposals for addressing them.

This presentation examines the connection between the utopian promise of personalization in digital media and the contemporary political culture of populism, as exemplified by the current administration of the United States. It argues that both personalization technologies—now pervasive across media environments, from social platforms to AI systems—and populist ideology are grounded in a shared promise. Specifically, they converge in their responses to two key questions: an epistemological one (“What is the true will of the people?”) and a methodological one (“How can that will be accessed?”). Both frameworks posit that modern, reflexive subjectivity obscures an authentic popular will. In response, they propose alternative mechanisms—algorithmic extraction in the case of personalization, and direct political appeal in the case of populism—to recover and enact this will. In doing so, they reconfigure the relationship between knowledge, subjectivity, and collective agency in contemporary culture.

When thinking of DIY (do-it-yourself) building culture, one often associates it with manual labour rather than digital infrastructure, as well as with individual projects rather than collective spatial conditions on the scale of the town or the city. This paper presents several case studies of DIY urban planning that, through individual practices, mostly deriving from the digital and social media realm, begin to constitute a larger urban scale of what might be described as DIY dystopias, or forms of urban non-planning. These cases reveal the ambivalent nature of the ideas of freedom, self-learning, and personal responsibility embedded within emerging DIY cultures. By employing a mixed-methods research approach, the paper argues that these cases can be interpreted as paradigmatic examples of neoliberal urban development: processes that may appear informal or even environmentally conscious, yet within which social and collective responsibilities are increasingly being redefined and displaced onto individuals.