Social Supercolliders: On the Promises and Pitfalls of Grand-Scale Participatory ICT Projects

Sebastian Vehlken (author)

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Metadata
Title	Social Supercolliders
Subtitle	On the Promises and Pitfalls of Grand-Scale Participatory ICT Projects
Contributor	Sebastian Vehlken (author)
License	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Copyright	Sebastian Vehlken
Publisher	meson press
Published on	2023-09-29
Short abstract	In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the FuturICT initiative set out to develop mediatechnological explanations and solutions for the laws behind complex, global, and socially interactive systems. As a decentralized supercomputing project, it aimed to improve social governance, multifaceted risk management, and increasing resilience and responsiveness in the face of unpredictable crises. From a media-historical perspective, two facets of the FuturICT project are of particular interest: First, its white papers mark a new kind of participatory, data-driven science that wants to know little of its (social) cybernetic heritage. Moreover, its positivist euphoria about reality mining hardly ever reflected on the pitfalls extensively discussed by sociology of risk, which in fact ended a first wave of planning and control in the 1970s. Second, if situated in a broader discursive context of similar ideas about the democratization of Big Data, why did FuturICT’s proposal for a third way—beyond Silicon-Valleystyle surveillance capitalism and Chinese-style state surveillance—remain unsuccessful?
Long abstract	In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the FuturICT initiative set out to develop mediatechnological explanations and solutions for the laws behind complex, global, and socially interactive systems. As a decentralized supercomputing project, it aimed to improve social governance, multifaceted risk management, and increasing resilience and responsiveness in the face of unpredictable crises. From a media-historical perspective, two facets of the FuturICT project are of particular interest: First, its white papers mark a new kind of participatory, data-driven science that wants to know little of its (social) cybernetic heritage. Moreover, its positivist euphoria about reality mining hardly ever reflected on the pitfalls extensively discussed by sociology of risk, which in fact ended a first wave of planning and control in the 1970s. Second, if situated in a broader discursive context of similar ideas about the democratization of Big Data, why did FuturICT’s proposal for a third way—beyond Silicon-Valleystyle surveillance capitalism and Chinese-style state surveillance—remain unsuccessful?
Page range	pp. 61–89
Language	English (Original)

Contributors

Sebastian Vehlken

(author)

Professor of Knowledge Processes and Digital Media at University of Oldenburg

Sebastian Vehlken is professor of Knowledge Processes and Digital Media at Universität Oldenburg, and head of the program area Ships as Knowledge Repositories at the German Maritime Museum/Leibniz-Institute for Maritime History. His research interests include the media history of computer simulation, media of futurology, and oceans as knowledge spaces.