Is the ‘socio-technical' becoming undone? A note on Ruckenstein's modes of engagement with digital futures

Abstract

This commentary is based on a review of the reflection paper by Minna Ruckenstein's on breathing spaces.

Minna Ruckenstein's (2024) paper ‘Collaborative explorations as breathing spaces for digital futures’ articulates several modes of engagement that can enable reflexive inquiry into the digital society – or what remains of this imaginary at the current juncture – which merit all of our attention.

Importantly, she notes that ‘algorithmic systems do not treat the everyday evenly but focus on aspects that can be tackled computationally’. This is a key point with significant implications for social studies of technology insofar as it suggests that computational platforms that are currently being implemented in government, the public sector, commerce and communication are marked by an asymmetric treatment of social and computational aspects of social life. As such, it opens the door to more serious challenges to the general notion of the ‘socio-technical’, and its applicability to contemporary digital systems.

The latter notion, after all, posits a constitutive symmetry between human, environmental and technical components, and, when applied to digital or automated systems, ascribes such symmetry as an ontological feature of such systems. Is Ruckenstein implying that this ascription is no longer warranted if we are to understand the role of algorithmic technologies in increasingly compute-intensive societies today?

Ruckenstein's implied challenge to symmetry also provides context for the notion of ‘breathing space’ that she puts forward. This proposition seems to me absolutely crucial and indeed necessary but also more challenging to realise than the author perhaps suggests. Interesting about this notion, among others, is the way in which it calls into question another, related methodological assumption of second wave STS, namely that ‘proximity’ to technical practice is always a good thing and to be aspired to in all social studies of technology.

In sharp contrast to the joy of proximity to big science and big technology, which is palpable in some of the influential STS writings from the 1990s and 2000s, Ruckenstein's essay seems to suggest that there is much to be gained from access to a proverbial room of our own. If I understand her correctly, she proposes that, if we are to recover a standpoint from which generative and productive engagement is possible across the boundaries between structurally over-resourced, celebrated computational sciences and structurally under-resourced, undervalued social studies, we need the capacity to distance our studies from their object alongside cultivating proximity. We need to find and create places where we can breathe as analysts and with allies, and this is likely to require occasions where we move away from the sites of computational research and innovation, narrowly defined, and indeed from those of technology-in-use.

It is important of course to not mistake the call for breathing space as a reassertion of conventional disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, it is probably worth saying that I have observed very similar aspirations and expressions of need among computer scientists and engineers: they too require breathing space. In this regard, it seems to be particular, constituted framings of computational science and social research, from which we all require much needed analytic and praxiological distance. Is the need for breathing space partly an artefact of growing rifts between the framings of algorithmic systems in official and administrative discourse and, as Dorothy Smith (1987) would have it, our lived experience of the opportunities and necessities of exchange among scientists and scholars operating in social and technical circles alike?

In this respect, I also wonder: is it really the case that ‘disengagement would […] conflict with “thinking with care”’? (p. 3), as Ruckenstein suggests? I can see that it can do, but I also believe that disengagement and care are often rather well aligned. Hasn't the gendered commitment to care not often been perceived, historically speaking, as an act of withdrawal from the public sphere? Isn't the bifurcation of the sphere of care and the sphere of engagement with alterity a more-or-less routine artefact of public and professional discourse? Here, our own respective standpoints within different regions – more specifically between the UK, where I am based, and Scandivia – as well as, possibly, class settings may be consequential for our understanding of the challenges of engagement. More straightforwardly, I would argue that, insofar as care requires establishing different terms of debate – which ‘going along’ with hegemonic discourse can easily prevent us from doing – disengagement is of critical importance to care.

A comment about the modality of inquiry that Ruckestein designates as ‘creating trouble’. This mode requires more qualification, I think, especially as activists and scholars have highlighted the ways in which existing inequalities condition the positive valuation of trouble and disruption, as Ruckensten is well aware. Briefly put, for a teen in a hoody in a rough part of London, trouble is an altogether different category of intervention than for a legal expert pondering the merits of civil disobedience for a forthcoming publication. In many contexts, creating trouble results in exclusion, but not all forms of exclusion are alike. There is then an aspect of privilege or even social hierarchy to the recent interest in provocation as a social methodology. In the case of the urban teenager, creating trouble is likely to just get you into more trouble and is not likely to be recognised as an epistemic strategy.

Creating breathing space in this respect is likely to be more fruitful if it is accompanied by efforts to expand the socio-economic frame of social and cultural studies of algorithmic systems. With regard to the opposition between market-based and rights-based approaches to data management, for example, this would mean recognising that this is not strictly a binary. The digital society is co-constituted across state, economy and civil society, and, as critics of democratic capitalism have long pointed out, the latter (rights) can be deployed to consolidate the former (markets). Indeed, this seems to be a key tenet – lifeline? – adopted in continued attempts to centre rights in innovation governance.

Creating breathing space, as Ruckenstein suggests, also requires a reappraisal of the distinction between knowledge and intervention. Ruckenstein discusses the decision ‘to push the researcher role aside and adopt more interventionist stances by positioning myself as a critic, advocate, provoker, or broker’. But aren't representation and intervention precisely closely connected in experimental inquiry? More minimally, aren't a researcher's interventions and their roles as broker and critic ideally closely informed by their research? I would like to insist that the distinction between knowledge and intervention cannot be a matter of either strict opposition or possible subsumption: research and intervention rather constitute a relation to be configured with knowledge-political acumen (see also Marres and Valderrama Barragan, 2025).

Similarly, I wonder how we can address the danger of an all too rigid understanding of the opposition between critical engagement and composing futures? Isn't it the case that composing futures is equally about finding spaces where the critical work of re-composition becomes possible? Ruckenstein's realisation that ‘there was little room to assemble’ seems crucial to me, and it is important to note that ‘composition’ as a form of agency is challenged all around these days and that in a way we must always start from the critical understanding of the necessity of re-composition, before we can get to composition.

Ruckenstein's discussion of regulation offers important reflections on its normative (mis-)uses, and deployment as a ‘a magic solution’ (p. 17). Her remarks make me wonder about the distribution of political agency implied by the AI act. Are their moments where we must contest the asymmetrical allocation of agency in relation to the future in which it falls to the state to set the ‘guard rails’ and industry to deliver ‘solutions’? Where is society in this? It is true that society must be defended but if the state monopolises this function, we return to a paternalistic framing of society, which have so long marred efforts to articulate principles of solidarity fit for our era.

Finally, I have a critical question about one of the last points in Ruckenstein's great paper, that ‘STS scholars should put their own visions more boldly into dialogue with expert visions’. I was confused by this as I understand the paper as precisely pointing to the limits of direct engagement with industry discourse and official narratives as a mode of intervention. Also, why buy into visioneering as a way to engage the question of the future? Isn't it the case that for visions to be recognised as visions we are forced to adopt the techno-utopian mode of expression that disarticulates the digital everyday? I think this conundrum requires more attention: as Ruckenstein suggest, sometimes we need to step away rather than accept that our work will serve the problematic objective of securing the societal relevance of capitalist techno-utopia (Wrobel, 2019).