Program

Kean Birch

Biography

Kean Birch is the Director of the Institute of Technoscience & Society, Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy, and Professor in the Department of Science, Technology & Society and the Graduate Program in Science & Technology Studies at York University, Canada. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and the Munich Center for Technology & Society, Technical University Munich, Germany.

He is an interdisciplinary social scientist who is interested in the changing political economy of science, technology, and innovation. He draws from science & technology studies, economic sociology, political economy, and economic geography in my research. Most of his recent empirical work focuses on the digital economy, especially the transformation of digital personal data into a political-economic asset and the role of large ‘tech’ firms in this process. Analytically, he is particularly interested in processes of assetization and rentiership. Alongside these interests, he also pursue research on artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies, and has undertaken research in the past on biotechnology, biofuels, and low-carbon technologies.

Talk

The Rise of a Tech Oligarchy

The aim of this lecture is to consider the shifting political contours of a technoscientific capitalism in which a small group of asset-rich social actors has assumed an increasingly prominent political role. This group can be has been characterized as a specifically ‘tech oligarchy’, representing an elite who have an inordinate say in how to organize technoscientifically our societies, polities, and economies. People like Julie Cohen (2024) point out that the tech oligarchy is constituted by political coordination to defend concentrations of (oligarchic) wealth; or, in my terms, these elites deploy their private assets politically to reinforce the concentration of private control over those and other assets. Centred on high-tech sectors (e.g. digital, artificial intelligence), the tech oligarchy is defined by a tripartite Californian ideology, mode of investment (e.g. venture capital), and monetary governance (e.g. private crypto) that epistemically and ethically legitimates technological innovation as the fount of societal change and productivity. Furthermore, such political coordination entrenches technological innovation as only possible within the ecosystems controlled by a few   multinational corporations. The rise of the tech oligarchy rests on a transformation of innovation, which has become (1) increasingly parasitic, designed specifically to extract and entrench wealth; (2) increasingly narrow in its goals, centred on monetary returns and metrics above all else; and (3) increasingly reflexive in the performative pursuit of techno-economic paradigms and cycles to jumpstart a new round of socio-technical productivity. All of these issues highlight the need for intervention into the political economy of technoscience, which science and technology studies can provide.

Harald Rohracher

Biography

Harald Rohracher is Professor of Technology and Social Change at Linköping University, Department of Thematic Studies, since 2012. He has a background in sociology as well as science, technology and innovation studies. He has been co-founder and director of the Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture (IFZ), Graz, Austria (1999-2007), Joseph A. Schumpeter Fellow at Harvard University (2009-10) and Simon Visiting Professor at Manchester University (2013). From 2014-2023 he has been Associate Editor of the journal ‘Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions’. In his research he is interested in the governance of socio-technical change, societal transformations towards greater sustainability as well as urban and regional low-carbon transitions.

Talk

The limits of experimentation and upscaling in urban climate transitions

Pilot projects, experiments, or living labs have increasingly become key tools for governing transformative change in general, and urban energy transitions in particular. Books such as “The Experimental City” (Evans et al., 2016) give witness of these shifts in urban governance in times of multiple crises and grand societal challenges. The idea is to test alternative socio-technical configurations in real-life settings, use them for learning how to do things differently and eventually scale them up to the whole city and beyond. In practice these projects and experiments are ridden by many problems which limit their contribution to urban transitions – they may be isolated from each other, no systematic learning is taking place, they are ‘projectified’ with a focus on short-term outcomes, they are highly situated and contextualised, or they may be captured by incumbent actors. In this talk I will critically analyse some examples of urban experimentation such as the development of positive energy districts or urban smart grid experiments as part of Swedish energy transition efforts. In a further step I will discuss different attempts of governance innovations beyond pilot projects which aim to achieve some level of systemic integration through transformative portfolios, system demonstrators, reflexive monitoring or alternative strategies of scaling.

Elena Esposito

Biography

Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at Bielefeld University and the University of Bologna. She has published extensively on the theory of society, media theory, memory theory and the sociology of financial markets. Her current research on algorithmic prediction is supported by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. Her latest books are Artificial Communication. How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence (2022); Kommunikation mit unverständlichen Maschinen (2024).

Talk

Answer Engines and Other Communication Partners

The talk explores the social role and implications of large language models (LLMs) through the lens of media theory. Rather than considering LLMs as advanced forms of artificial intelligence, I will argue that a communication-focused perspective provides a more effective way to interpret their impact on information management in contemporary society and to address the associated ethical and operational challenges. Supported by information management tools such as archives, catalogs, and later search engines, previous communication media expanded the scope of communication, making it possible to reach more, distant, diverse, and possibly anonymous communication partners. LLMs now signify a new phase in the evolution of communication, as they function themselves as communication partners capable of responding autonomously to user queries in a personalized manner. This perspective highlights and explains the capabilities and limitations of various LLM-based chatbots and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models, while also addressing issues such as misalignment and hallucinations.