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ComAI Research Group at the 43rd DGS Conference

At the 43rd Conference of the German Sociological Association (DGS) on the theme “Futures of Society,” the ComAI Research Group is holding two presentations today, on October 1, 2026.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp (P1) will deliver the presentation “From ‘Quiet’ to ‘Loud’ Futuring: Silicon Valley, Pioneer Communities, and the Cultural Dynamics of Creating AI Futures.”:

Where do Silicon Valley’s visions of the AI future come from? A superficial answer to this question is: from “Big Tech” and the “Tech Bros.” However, a more in-depth analysis is necessary to grasp the cultural dynamics of AI-related futuring and the inequality and power it rearticulates. In my presentation, I aim to show that Big Tech’s “loud futuring” incorporates the visions of “quiet futuring” from technology-oriented groups in and around Silicon Valley into broader societal imaginaries. Thus, many of today’s AI futures stem from the Whole Earth Network, Effective Altruism, and other Pioneer Communities. Drawing on an ethnographic study comprising 321 interviews as well as analyses of the Silicon Valley Archives, I trace these cultural dynamics and discuss their theoretical significance.
The presentation is divided into three parts. In the first, I examine the dynamics of “quiet” and “loud futuring”: I show to what extent the future visions of Pioneer Communities serve as a fundamental resource for Big Tech’s “loud futuring”—and how Big Tech, at the same time, provides a framework for the future discourse of Pioneer Communities. In the second part, I reconstruct AI-related visions of the future spanning three generations: from “cybernetic futures” (futures of self-organizing society) through “agile futures” (futures of digital agile capitalism) to contemporary “slippery futures,” in which techno-solutionism and existential threat converge. The third part offers a sociotheoretical reflection: the unprecedented concentration of capital accelerates the implementation of certain visions of the future, and the attribution of agency to AI transforms knowledge practices in academia and the professional world.
For sociology, this means analyzing the emergence of technology in relation to projections, visions, and imaginaries of futures—and not only once the relevant technologies have had a broad societal impact.

Prof. Dr. Wiebke Loosen (P5) and Prof. Dr. Michaela Pfadenhauer (P7) will present their joint talk titled “Societal Futures of Communicative AI: Expropriative Appropriation in Journalism and Companion App Technologies.”:

Communicative AI is considered the technology of the future par excellence. Its future-oriented character is virtually tangible: as cultural imagination, as a technological principle, as structurally embedded potential that legitimizes present-day actions. Nevertheless, this future-oriented character remains elusive, a fact linked to the structural characteristics of communicative AI: what it is does not emerge prior to appropriation, but rather through it. Different processes of appropriation do not produce different ways of using the same system, but rather different communicative AIs and thus different communicative realities that emerge within social structures, which we refer to as hybrid figurations. Which societal futures communicative AI brings about is therefore not technologically predetermined, but is produced through processes of appropriation.
Appropriation does not occur in just one direction—we distinguish three modes: “Appropriation of ComAI” describes how actors integrate and reshape communicative AI into domain-specific practices. “Appropriation through ComAI” focuses on the fact that communicative AI becomes a mediating entity through which actors appropriate something that lies beyond ComAI itself. “Appropriation by ComAI” refers to the structural process in which communicative AI, as a rhizomatic, opaque infrastructure, takes up and transforms practices, forms of knowledge, and communicative patterns from various domains.
This intertwining represents a structural pattern that we refer to as “dispossessive appropriation”: The appropriation of communicative AI structurally carries within it potential moments of dispossession—of one’s own agency, one’s own irreplaceability, and one’s own power to define. This is not a side effect of appropriation but manifests as a pattern that distinguishes the appropriation of communicative AI from the appropriation of earlier media technologies.
In this presentation, we will elaborate on this understanding of the appropriation of communicative AI and apply it to our empirical research on journalism and the use of companion apps in everyday life, which we are currently conducting as part of the DFG/FWF research group “Communicative AI.”

Further details on both presentations can be found here.