Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

We examine techno-nationalism in Türkiye as a temporal and affective infrastructure that organizes youth subjectivity and civic devotion. Through the National Technology Initiative and TEKNOFEST, technological labor becomes ritualized preparation for sustaining national futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines techno-nationalism in Türkiye as a temporal and affective infrastructure that organizes youth subjectivity, obligation, and civic devotion. Focusing on the state-led National Technology Initiative (NTI) and its flagship mega-event TEKNOFEST, we conceptualize “national technology” not merely as an innovation agenda but as a socio-technical formation that composes a moral relationship to time, endurance, and collective destiny.

Building on STS approaches that understand infrastructures as devices that render the future actionable (Stine & Volmar 2021), we argue that the NTI operates as a temporal governance apparatus. Through competition cycles, prototyping regimes, sustainability rhetoric, and calls for nationwide mobilization, it structures a public time order centered on continuity, preparedness, and deferred fulfillment. Youth are positioned less as political actors of the present than as embodied carriers of a national future to be continuously cultivated and sustained.

Within this configuration, TEKNOFEST functions as both infrastructure and ritual. Public demonstrations and collective spectacles transform technological competence into experiential verification of national capability. These practices ritualize repetition, normalize disciplined self-work, and cultivate affective states such as pride, hope, and responsibility. Echoing Nikolas Rose’s notion of “governing the soul” (1999), techno-nationalism operates through ethical self-formation as much as state discourse.

Drawing on discourse analysis and interviews with young participants, we show that this temporal-affective order is negotiated rather than mechanically reproduced. By analyzing techno-nationalism as a temporal infrastructure linking governance, ritual, and affect, the paper contributes to STS debates on how infrastructures shape civic devotion and the futures imagined as worth sustaining.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines short-video scrolling as a sociotechnical practice that reshapes everyday temporal rhythms. With insights from Ihde, Lefebvre, and STS, it explores how algorithms and interface design become entangled with users’ experience of time.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines short-video scrolling practices (Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts) as sites where everyday time is calibrated through sociotechnical mediation. Rather than approaching scrolling as distraction or addiction, I conceptualize it as a rhythmic practice through which digital infrastructures participate in ordering duration, repetition, and obligation in daily life.

The analysis brings together Don Ihde’s postphenomenology, Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, and Science and Technology Studies to investigate how temporal experience emerges through human–technology relations. Interface features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendation, and metric feedback participate in shaping and mediating how users experience pauses, transitions, and interruptions within everyday routines.

Based on in-depth interviews with active short-video users, the study traces how scrolling becomes incorporated into cyclical rhythms (fatigue, sleep), linear rhythms (work, study), and social rhythms (messaging, shared viewing). These interactions produce shifting alignments and tensions between bodily limits, platform logics, and temporal expectations. Moments of “rupture,” such as sudden awareness of time loss, moral self-questioning, or algorithmic misalignment, render otherwise invisible forms of technological mediation perceptible.

I argue that short-video platforms operate as temporal infrastructures that calibrate everyday rhythms through ongoing human–algorithm interaction. Users respond through self-regulation techniques and narrative rationalizations that stabilize or contest this sociotechnical arrangement. By foregrounding temporal mediation and rhythmic ordering, the paper shows how everyday time is co-produced through relations between users, algorithms, and interface infrastructures.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper will look at the prophetic elements of contemporary discourses around AI and develop a concept of technological prophecy through the example of tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s lectures on AI regulations and the Antichrist.

Paper long abstract

Recent years have seen a surge in the development and a wider discourse surrounding Artificial Intelligence. Public imaginaries around what exactly the technology means and the opportunities and threats it represents are still developing, and they include social and religious components that shape and direct our discourses, with those advocating for AI taking on an increasingly prophetic tone and rhetoric. The AI industry and its supporters are connected to a wider political-religious nexus that increasingly dominates politics throughout the US and Europe, billionaire AI tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel for example giving lectures on the Antichrist. This project will interrogate the religious and prophetic elements of contemporary AI discourses by combining perspectives of the Sociology of Religion and Science and Technology Studies. It will aim to formulate a new theoretical perspective on technological prophecy, linking Weber’s characterization of the prophet with insights from research in science popularization on how we make sense of new technological concepts.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This paper asks how Turkish university students use cryptocurrency, savings accounts, and online gambling to construct alternative relationships to time and the future under chronic inflation, drawing on STS scholarship on temporal infrastructure.

Paper long abstract

In Turkey, where chronic inflation has persisted for over two decades, the conventional temporal infrastructure of higher education has become increasingly unreliable. This paper asks how university students construct alternative temporal infrastructures through digital financial practices, and what these constructions reveal about the relationship between technology, time, and economic survival under conditions of monetary instability. Drawing on STS scholarship that understands technologies as "time machines" capable of composing temporal orders (Stine and Volmar 2021), we examine three practices widespread among Turkish college students: cryptocurrency trading, high-interest savings accounts and online gambling. Each practice embeds its participants in a distinct temporal arrangement but how exactly do they mediate the sense of duration, obligation and the future? What kinds of temporal subjects do they produce? And how do the material features of platforms (notifications, interfaces, feedback loops) participate in organizing not only economic calculation but moral and affective orientations toward time? Building on work that situates technology and self-formation as co-constituted (Amrute 2010), we are particularly interested in the ways these financial practices blur the boundary between the technical and the devotional. Based on interviews and digital ethnography with university students, this paper explores how inflation operates as a temporal crisis, and how the digital infrastructures through which students engage with it reshape the moral dimensions of inhabiting time under late capitalism.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper combines Jan Assmann's political theology with Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of technology to reveal the theological basis of understanding AI as a collaborator. I examine the ritual through which AI transforms from a product of IT-work into a force reshaping the field.

Paper long abstract

This paper develops the concept of technotheology to analyze how IT specialists make sense of AI's transformation of their professional field. Combining Jan Assmann's political theology — particularly his work on the total religions — with Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of technology (where religion is the way the world affects the self, while technology is the means of impacting the world), I examine how it happens that IT workers perceive AI as a collaborator rather than merely a tool.

The empirical part emerges from ongoing research on Russian IT specialists. AI systems, originally products of their labor, increasingly become forces redefining professional boundaries, skills, and identities. Drawing on LDA and controversies analysis of professional forums (Habr) and in-depth interviews, I investigate how specialists construct AI's agency through rituals. The theoretical framework reveals how technological change is framed through categories of the sacred: anxieties about replacement, narratives of salvation through AI adoption, and purification rituals distinguishing "proper" from "improper" use.

This approach moves beyond instrumental understandings of human-AI collaboration by showing how technotheological patterns structure professional sensemaking. My hypothesis here is yet to be examined. However, I suggest that the radical temporal shift of obeying the command (by computer) is a key feature of the transformation process.

The paper contributes to STS and organization studies by proposing technotheology as a lens for understanding how professional communities negotiate technological transformations — not merely through skill adaptation but through meaning-making practices that recast technology as both product and producer of their world.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Analyzing the social and epistemic aspects of carbon durability and drawing on Agamben's political theology, this paper argues that Carbon Removal is better understood as an apparatus for accumulating and governing debt: it contains the undesirable while creating obligations across deep time.

Paper long abstract

Gaining momentum after the 2015 Paris Agreement, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies are often framed as canceling out emissions toward climate mitigation. However, recent debates on carbon “durability”—the persistence of sequestration across different methods and timescales—complicate this promise.

Analyzing the social and epistemic aspects of carbon durability and drawing on Agamben's political theology, this paper argues that CDR is better understood as an apparatus for accumulating and governing debt. Agamben (in The Mystery of Evil [2017] and elsewhere) shows that in modern governance, evil must be contained rather than expelled, because the very act of restraint structures historical time and enables political life to continue. Carbon removal emerges precisely to fulfill such a role: not eliminating CO₂ but containing it, while simultaneously creating new liabilities and obligations across deep time.

Carbon durability is not only a matter of geophysical capacity but a complex socio-technical construction including scientific definitions, standardization protocols, legal and accounting structures, economic instruments of derisking and carbon insurance, professionalized monitoring practices, and routinized landscape maintenance. Aside from the flows and storage of material carbon, this governmental apparatus also manages temporal obligations towards future landscapes and generations. To make carbon durable, then, is to create socio-epistemic debt: responsibility for institutional memory, monitoring infrastructure, data collection, and remediation capacity that must persist for centuries.

Methodologically, I analyze public and private durability standards (Kyoto Protocol, EU framework, Verra, Puro.earth) through Agamben’s discussion of the katechon and the debt/guilt binary, as well as through parallels to the history of burial practices.