This paper examines the transformation of digital futures through two Brazilian songs: Gilberto Gil's Pela Internet (1996) and Caetano Veloso's Anjos Tronchos (2021). Read together, they illuminate a broader shift from early imaginaries of openness, participation, to a platformized environment structured by data extraction, infrastructural concentration, and asymmetrical dependencies. This shift relocates political struggle from communication to governing the infrastructures of data, AI, and platform power. Drawing on theories of countergovernance, it examines how collective action can challenge concentrated platform power through reciprocity and commons-based infrastructures. Adopting a conceptual and interpretive approach, it treats the songs as historically situated interventions while positioning Brazil's free culture movement as a concrete experiment in commons-building. In doing so, it positions Brazil as a place one thinks from, not only about: a site revealing both the possibilities and fragility of institutionalized commons while offering political repertoires for contesting platform power and reimagining digital futures.

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.

With this contribution, we present a framework for what we call utopian media studies. This framework is derived from our work as co-editors on a special issue called ‘Utopian Media Studies’ that will be published in Convergence. This special issue departs from the observation that digital media studies generally operates within a register of ‘critique’ but that it has fewer rigorous conventions to produce what Ruth Levitas (2013) describes as the utopian ‘reconstitution of society.’ Following Steven Jackson’s (2023: 428) claim that the ‘mutual transmission of hope’ may be ‘the central task ... of critical scholarship today,’ we consider how media studies can become a site of utopian digital praxis, research and experimentation. We do so by highlighting five sensibilities to explicate the nature, value and contribution of utopian media studies and by exploring concrete ways in which existing media studies research is doing utopian work that aligns with these sensibilities.