Technofutures in Stasis: Smart Machines, Ubiquitous Computing, and the Future That Keeps Coming Back
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Technoculture promises eternal novelty, but it is often the same old future that keeps coming back. This article argues that the systemic repetition of imagined technofutures often sustains stagnant imaginaries of social relations embedded in those futures. Recycled visions of the smart office or the robot vacuum cleaner carry with them normative assumptions about relations of labor and gender, home and family, that are sheltered from scrutiny through the language of innovative “disruptions.” Drawing on archival research, I analyze the imagined futures of ubiquitous computing (“ubicomp”) in the 1990s, and their resonances in the popularization of “smart” machines today. Ubicomp’s signature promise of disappearing computers rested on a familiar conflation of individualized convenience with freedom—a view of breathless innovation underwritten by a static, ossified imagination of domestic labor or the white-collar office. Such mythmaking reproduces a persistent pattern of one-dimensional thought, in which asymmetric power relations and perverse economic incentives for data surveillance are systematically excluded from the drawing board.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".