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Short abstract

What constitutes an alternative? This paper proposes Sociotechnical Persistence as a theoretical phrame suggesting that alternatives are not what emerges against hegemony but what endures through it — sustained ideological, organisational and technical continuities maintained across rupture.

Long abstract

This panel asks what constitutes an alternative:empirically and theoretically. This paper proposes a theoretical reorientation: an alternative is not defined by its opposition to hegemony, nor by its emergence against it, but by its persistence through it.

Contemporary STS frameworks for thinking alternativity tend toward the new — the emergent, the imagined, the prefigurative. This orientation risks the four problems the panel identifies: nostalgic longing for what alternatives once were, capture by anti-democratic fantasies of what they could become, unexamined assumptions about who gets to participate, and insufficient theoretical ground beneath the concept itself.

This paper proposes Sociotechnical Persistence as a theoretical framework that reframes alternativity as continuity-despite-rupture. Drawing from Panich (2020), who shows that persistence is not about holding an original form intact but about sustaining what is essential while adapting what is necessary, Sociotechnical Persistence defines alternatives through three analytical dimensions (Jamison and Eyerman 1991): ideological transmission (how founding principles circulate across generations), organisational continuity (how commons-based governance travels under conditions of imposed dominance), and technical adaptation (how infrastructures evolve while maintaining non-extractive logics). Crucially, the framework distinguishes persistence from survival: communities can continue operating while losing their alternative character through co-optation. Persistence ends not when the organisation dissolves but when its continuities do.

This reorientation has consequences for how STS theorises alternativity: away from the question of what futures we can imagine, toward the question of what has never stopped existing.