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Paper short abstract

How can we study AI futures without reproducing their foreclosures? This paper proposes a methodology of collective autonomy that combines genealogical discourse analysis with speculative and critical data practices to reclaim futuring as a democratic, politically contested practice.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary scholarship on AI faces a distinctive methodological challenge: how to study systems whose opacity, scale, and embeddedness in sociotechnical imaginaries resist conventional analytical approaches. This paper develops a genealogical and discursive methodology for investigating how visions of the digital future are produced, naturalised, and contested — arguing that foregrounding metaphor and discourse renders visible the epistemological assumptions through which post-democratic futures are increasingly normalised.

Drawing on critical discourse analysis and the history of sociotechnical imaginaries, we trace how datafication, smartness, and AI have fostered visions that privilege financial speculation over democratic participation. Attending to metaphor and mediation — drawing on Serres' relational philosophy of interference and entanglement — we encircle AI by mapping the discursive and imaginative conditions of its possibility rather than attempting to penetrate the black box.

We then propose a two-movement methodological intervention. The first, critical and archaeological, reads AI systems against the grain: examining training data, benchmarks, and model documentation as sites where epistemological assumptions and geopolitical hierarchies are sedimented. The second, speculative and anticipatory, uses scenario-building, counterfactual imaginaries, and design probes to enact collective futuring rather than merely analyse it. These practices instantiate methodological collective autonomy: research conducted from within sociotechnical entanglements, oriented toward shared judgment rather than sovereign critique.

Collective autonomy functions not only as a theoretical counter-concept to techno-capitalist futuring, but as a methodological commitment by practising dissent and keeping open the question of what futures remain possible.