Short Abstract

This panel explores AI, blockchain, and other algorithmic infrastructures as a digital pantheon shaping future imaginaries, rituals, and power. We examine how belief, speculation, and governance practices enact socio-technical futures and redistribute agency.

Description

This panel investigates the emergence of a "digital pantheon", a new symbolic order forming around technologies like AI, blockchain, and algorithmic governance. We analyse these entities not as mere tools but as powerful socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim) and infrastructures that concentrate classical sacred dimensions (such as belief, revelation, and the inherent ambivalence between salvation and annihilation), command ritualistic adherence and structure collective imagination. They function as modern deities and demons (opaque, autonomous, and authoritative) whose blackboxed "wills" need to be interpreted by developers, users and policymakers. This new wave of mystification of technology and re-enchantment of the world through its dataification returns us to the earlier religious practices, varying from the archaic antropomorphization and superstitions, to sophisticated theology and visioneering. At the same time, they reinforce the quasi-religious elements of modernity: the “invisible hand” of the market, the inevitability of progress, or the dystopian apocalyptic thinking.

Approaching these formations as fate-making institutions, we ask how they script trajectories and risks, redistribute agency between humans and non-humans, and shape regimes of value, trust and legitimacy. We are particularly interested in moments where speculative financial practices, engineering imaginaries and cultural beliefs converge to produce new forms of political ontology that go from algorithmic prophecy to crypto-messianism and AI governance mythos.

We welcome contributions that:

- Examine the myths, deities, rituals, narratives and prophecies surrounding digital and algorithmic systems;

- Analyse how these entities reconfigure notions of agency, value, and destiny;

- Investigate their role in interdisciplinary collaborations (e.g., between engineering, economics and the humanities);

- Critique the frontiers they establish (e.g., digital utopias, virtual worlds) and the new natures they produce.

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