Anticipation and modal power: Opening up and closing down the momentum of sociotechnical systems

‘The future’ in the co-production of sociotechnical worlds: Constituting momentums through anticipatory artifacts

Sociotechnical configurations shape our physical, affective, moral, and legal environments. They channel the relationships we establish with others (both humans and non-humans) and thereby ‘enable and constrain basic human possibilities’ (Jasanoff, 2016, p. 9). Sociotechnical assemblages co-constitute the scene and integrate the organization and rules through which our worlds (and their meanings) take root and flourish. Sociotechnical systems are playgrounds of and for power.

Anticipatory dynamics are a key element when addressing how these enabling and constraining spaces of possibility are established. The dynamics of anticipation are those activated by means of future-oriented artifacts such as predictive regimes, scripts, imaginaries, visions, and expectations. They co-shape sociotechnical systems, playing an important role in opening up and closing down sociotechnical systems’ momentum. STS scholars have addressed these anticipatory dynamics – even if not always named and identified as such – under a variety of approaches.

Anticipation and the formation of sociotechnical momentum

Practices of anticipation are crucial components of the constellation of practices that shape STM. Anticipation is simultaneously constitutive of and constituted by the dynamics of sociotechnical systems.

Understanding how anticipation connects to STM requires addressing not only how sociotechnical systems develop and unfold in historical or chronological time, but also how such development is embedded in and modulated by heterogeneous and evolving orders of temporality (see Selin, 2006). Such regimes of temporality manifest ways of being in time (i.e. of experiencing and ordering the past, the present, and the future) (Hartog, 2003; Koselleck, 2004). Although the experimentations of past, present, and future are inextricably interwoven (Doll et al., 2015; Seligman et al., 2016), these temporal dimensions are not typically symmetrically articulated in guiding the directionality of our actions. The three temporal dimensions always resonate but they take on different intensities and tonalities depending on the situation and context (see Emirbayer & Mische, 1998).

Specifically, connecting the practices of anticipation to the formation of STM involves attending to how inhabiting the not-yet – in terms of both modality (heterogeneous modes and genres of approaching and living the future) and content (images of the future) – enacts individual and social life in the present (e.g. Bryant & Knight, 2019). Practices of anticipation thus demand paying attention to how the prospective grammars underlying current future-oriented practices and ‘living futures’ perpetuate, stabilize, and transform our sociotechnical systems (Mische, 2009, 2014, pp. 451–457). Anticipation consequently prompts us to attend to how futures are created, silenced/reinforced, and sustained/altered to steer sociotechnical coevolution processes toward certain projects and away from others (Adam & Groves, 2007, p. 198; Alvial-Palavicino, 2015; Jasanoff, 2015). The trajectory of nanotechnology is exemplary in this regard: Futures were central to stimulating the momentum of nano development by supporting its legitimacy and socially anchoring it as a key ‘enabling’ technology (Anderson, 2007; Berube, 2004; Parandian et al., 2012; Selin, 2006, 2007).

STS scholars and practitioners have long been interested in intentional and highly formal uses of the future. For instance, classic works in the field have asked how forecasting and expert-based future modeling methods are simultaneously products and constructive elements of efforts to ‘depoliticize’ the future (e.g. Jasanoff, 2003; Nowotny et al., 2001). Predictive approaches to the future and modes of orienting action on the basis of forecast models have proven to be instrumentally valuable to technocratic approaches, in which political-technical issues are reduced to their technical aspects. These techniques often serve to justify controversial decisions in political decision-making arenas as well as to establish the relevance of specific present events (see Mallard & Lakoff, 2011; Sarewitz et al., 2000).

STS has also been a central locus for the study of informal uses of the future, that are not always intentional, conscious, or controlled. ¹ Although this literature does not always use the term ‘anticipation’, it is also concerned with the future-oriented character of science and technology and the role that futures play in enabling and constraining alternative possibilities. For instance, the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) program identified that ‘physical artifacts project into the future the socially constructed characteristics acquired in the past when they were designed’ (Bijker et al., 1987, p. 77). Likewise, Actor-Network Theory considers how these future projections are embedded in ‘scripts’. Scripts are ascribed to technological artifacts during their design processes to mediate the experiences and behaviors of their (future) users. As Latour (1992, p. 244) illustrates, embedded in speed bumps is: ‘Slow down your vehicle (or else break the suspension)!’ Although scripts are not thought to fully determine experiences and actions, their role is to limit the future possibilities of use and experience by prescribing the performance of some actions instead of others (see Akrich, 1992; Latour, 1992). In this sense, the scripts operate as anticipatory elements that aim to constrain the sphere of potential meanings attributed to a technological artifact and the potential actions that could be realized through such an artifact. ²

The late 1990s and early 2000s were particularly fruitful in terms of identifying and recognizing that ‘[c]o-production processes include anticipation’ and that ‘[t]echnical change is driven partly by the historical experience of actors, their views of the future and their perception of the promise or threat of impacts which will change over time’ (Schot & Rip, 1997, p. 257). The growing interest in the sociology of expectations at that time undoubtedly played an important role in this identification and recognition (see Borup et al., 2006). The sociology of expectations literature emphasizes that promises and expectations form important anticipatory elements that dynamically shape science, technology, and innovation practices. Evidence from a number of empirical case studies illustrates how promise-based rhetoric and expectation dynamics are instrumental in fueling the material realization of scientific-technological projects (e.g. Alvial-Palavicino & Konrad, 2019; Brown & Michael, 2003; Brown et al., 2000; Pollock & Williams, 2010; van Lente & Rip, 1998a). For instance, van Lente and Rip (1998b) show how the mobilization of promises and the subsequent conformation of ‘shared expectations’ constituted the backbone for the development of mutual positionings around membrane technology and its establishment as a strategic research field.

Heterogeneous coexisting theories of sociotechnical development and change (Sovacool & Hess, 2017) currently focus on the roles that these and other related prospective elements perform in sociotechnical dynamics. For instance, several authors stress the importance of the mobilization of ‘leitbilder’ or guiding visions: ‘schemata that represent future objectives and express the means by which these objectives will be realized’ (Berkhout, 2006, p. 302). The futures mobilized by the in-vitro meat industry fit this definition. In-vitro meat visions embodied the future goal of solving the problems of overproduction and overconsumption of meat while meeting sustainability and animal ethics standards, and positioned in-vitro meat as the better means by which these goals could and should be achieved (see Ferrari & Lösch, 2017). Once alignment with a future goal is embodied in the vision, the vision unfolds its normative power by establishing a technology as the best or necessary solution to achieve that goal, thereby directing and guiding action toward its fulfillment (see Dierkes et al., 1992; Hellige, 1996; Lösch, 2006; Schneider & Lösch, 2019).

‘Sociotechnical imaginaries’ is another prominent concept in STS that is tightly connected to the aforementioned ones. Sociotechnical imaginaries are ‘visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 4). Like leitbilder, sociotechnical imaginaries connect social and technological orders while encoding a normative force: They subtly prescribe ‘how life ought, or ought not, to be lived’ (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 4). Jasanoff and Kim (2009, 2013), for example, have documented how sociotechnical imaginaries on nuclear energy in the United States and South Korea played a crucial role in framing the future benefits and risks of nuclear energy. Sociotechnical imaginaries were instrumental in reinforcing their respective hegemonic ideals of collective life and socio-political orderings (see also Ballo, 2015; Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). ³

Promises, expectations, visions, and imaginaries are collectively held and co-produced representations about the future that function as STM modulators, nudging sociotechnical systems toward certain paths (see Brown & Michael, 2003, p. 3; Konrad, 2006, p. 430). They are simultaneously evolving products and performative producers of sociotechnical realities. These sociotechnical futures colonize belief and value systems and the horizons that configure individual and social agency, thereby legitimizing action programs and mobilizing resources (Anderson, 2007; Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 123; Konrad & Böhle, 2019). Despite being fictitious in character, futures re-arrange ‘the mass’ of sociotechnical systems and provide it with directionality. They enable and constrain the orientation and speed of development of scientific-technological activities by gearing them toward satisfying particular agendas and social orders (Michael, 2000).

The political dynamics of enabling and constraining (or opening up and closing down) the directionality and speed of sociotechnical systems through futures can be framed within a model in which the course of history is reconstructed as a space full of possibilities that could have been realized, but few of which finally materialized, in what we reconstruct (not without difficulties, tensions, and struggles) as ‘the past’. Past pathways could have taken alternative directions and history can thus be conceived of as a space filled with unrealized opportunities. The present is a contingent outcome of an incalculable and highly complex constellation of events and decisions, an outcome that simultaneously enables and constrains future possibilities.

However, how various actors navigate the ‘presently open possibilities’ varies, and this navigation is anticipatorily mediated by predictive regimes, scripts, visions, expectations, and sociotechnical imaginaries. The representations of the future that coexist act as anticipatory artifacts constraining the set of conceivable normative and pragmatic possibilities on the basis of which diverse actors direct (and give meaning to) their present actions. Anticipatory artifacts close down imagination to a concrete subset of possibilities out of the vast ocean afforded by the present condition (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Topographies of futures anticipatorily providing directionality to the coevolution of sociotechnical systems. Created by the author.

As Michael (2017) suggests, this landscape of futures is variable. Futures emerge, expand and decay in geographically and temporally localized manners, and these mutate over time in accordance with the sociotechnical co-production dynamics that simultaneously sustain and shape their ongoing development. In the struggle for effective STM influence, different topographies of futures maintain interactions and relations of different kinds and depths between them (e.g. total or partial confrontation, domination, mutual nourishment, neutrality). In this process, the heterogeneous futures acquire distinct social densities according to (1) the ability of each future to attract, convince, and mobilize different actors, and (2) the positioning of these ‘future holders’ within their network. The density of future representations at any given moment determines the predominant – but not unique – mode of orientation of actions at that moment and thus constitutes the dominant directionality of the STM. Futures’ varying topographies configure anticipatory dynamics that shape how the future is approached and which prescriptive and normative assumptions we attribute to the future. Futures representations are thus machineries that express and shape the politics of future-making; as such, they are never free of socio-political tensions and struggles (Jasanoff, 2020).

The political significance of anticipation has led to normative STS proposals to attend to anticipation as an object of critique and intervention (e.g. Konrad & Alvial Palavicino, 2017; Lösch et al., 2017, 2019). Proposals such as Constructive Technology Assessment (Schot & Rip, 1997), Vision Assessment (Grin & Grunwald, 2000; Grunwald, 2009), and Hermeneutic Technology Assessment (Grunwald, 2020) are exemplary here. The first proposal strives ‘to broaden the design of new technologies (and the redesign of old technologies)’ (Schot & Rip, 1997, p. 252) by expanding the concerns and actors considered; that is, it aims to problematize the scripts attached to technologies in design processes. The other two proposals aim to critically assess the sociotechnical meanings that visions and futures convey. ⁴

In some instances, these assessment and intervention activities not only have the future as their focus, but also use representations of the future as resources. Following a ‘similia et similibus curantur’ rationale (literally – ‘like cures like’), several STS initiatives promote foresight, visioning or futuring techniques as means to open up the futures that shape STM. In contrast to technocratic uses of futures, the operationalization of these anticipatory techniques seeks to broaden the range of concerns considered by nurturing critical reflective capabilities (e.g. Arnaldi, 2018; Betten et al., 2018; Rip & Kulve, 2008; Swierstra et al., 2009). For instance, Selin (2011) operationalizes futures scenarios to explore alternative impacts of nanotechnologies, Lehoux et al. (2020) to stimulate moral imagination in health technology, and Withycombe Keeler et al. (2019) to promote ‘emancipatory’ capabilities and sustainable presents.

Examples of recent proposals that explicitly operationalize anticipation as a non-predictivist and non-technocratic tool are Anticipatory Governance (Barben et al., 2008; Guston, 2014), ⁵ Responsible Research and Innovation (European Commission, 2013b; von Schomberg, 2013), Responsible Innovation (Stilgoe et al., 2013), and recent formulations of Technology Assessment (Grunwald, 2019; Nazarko, 2017). All of these initiatives share a common aim of opening up sociotechnical systems’ STM by making the closure processes fostered by futures amenable to interventive modulation.

Anticipation thus appears in STS as: (1) one element of the co-production and coevolution dynamics constituting STM, (2) a phenomenon that should be subject to critical-reflexive consideration, and (3) an interventive method to modulate the prospective structures of contemporary sociotechnical systems.

Modal power and the politics of (un)certain futures

Because anticipatory constituents orchestrate the direction of the ongoing construction of sociotechnical realities, they can be understood as mechanisms of power fabrication, mobilization, and enactment. The anticipatory power and relevance of sociotechnical futures and predictivist regimes lies in the functions they perform within the politics of opening up and closing down future-making practices: They constrain the focus and scope of the projections and agential choreographies through which STM is ongoingly co-constructed (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Mische, 2009). As blinkers, the anticipatory power of anticipatory artifacts lies in their ability to enframe and limit the envisioning of certain spaces of possibility toward which future-making practices could be directed. If power is fundamentally understood as the capacity of an agent to influence the direction in which reality unfolds, then anticipation can be considered as a subtle mechanism for the fabrication, mobilization, and execution of power.

This mechanism of power finds its basic modus operandi in fixing hypothetical assumptions concerning what is or should be considered (im)plausible and (un)desirable, thereby restricting the imagination about practical alternative possibilities and present actions. Future representations channel the range of possibilities that animate the direction of ongoing activities and actions that constitute STM, hampering the contemplation of alternatives to guide future-making practices. Fuller (2018, pp. 139–149) has labeled this capability to fix the conceivable space of possibilities ‘modal power’. The heterogeneous future representations widely distributed in the social space form choreographies of anticipatory topological dynamics that engage, fabricate, modulate, and exercise modal power.

Recalling the empirical cases mentioned in the previous section, the promises and expectations of membrane technology, or the sociotechnical imaginaries of nuclear energy are relevant because they encode empirical and normative stances that fix (or close down) the space of conceivable alternatives. They fix how each technology should be socially and technically framed and valued as well as the sociotechnical orders that could or should be pursued through such technology. In the same vein, predictivist apparatuses often fix the scope and depth of the issues potentially considered in technology assessment processes (e.g. by focusing on risks and obscuring the required political debate about the purposes and means of technological development). Predictivist modes of framing futures constrain agents’ modal imagination both in terms of considering unpredictable impacts and problematizing the processes, purposes, and directions of research and development.

The exercise of modal power through anticipatory practices is at the heart of the political life of opening up and closing down STM (see Figure 1). Hughes subtly alluded to how sociotechnical design practices – identified in the previous section as being mediated by anticipatory practices – involve the exercise of what is here framed as ‘modal power’: ‘One of the primary characteristics of a system builder is the ability to construct or to force unity from diversity, centralization in the face of pluralism, and coherence from chaos. This construction often involves the destruction of alternative systems’ (Hughes, 1987, p. 52). The mobilization of visions, expectations, and imaginaries and the confinement of governance articulations on predictive modeling involve the maintenance and destruction of alternatives by subtle fixations on what can be considered certain or uncertain, what is imaginable and what is not. They inevitably lead to the destruction of alternatives that might nevertheless have been legitimately considered.

The concept of ‘modal power’ offers a tentative account of the mechanisms by which sociotechnical futures and predictive machineries enable and constrain possibilities, acquiring performativity and socio-political significance. To illuminate the mechanisms that exercise modal power through the mobilization of futures involves grappling with the politics that underlie the anticipatory fabrication of empirical and normative (un)certainty. Representations of the future that are co-generated and mobilized across social practices generate and conceal, under specific modalities, the spaces of (un)certainty that are detectable and recognizable as such.

Spaces of (un)certainty are established in terms of what is deemed necessary and contingent, desirable and undesirable, etc. By looking to the modes of production and mobilization of modal power, the focus is not so much (or not only) on how the existence of epistemic ambiguity and uncertainty in contexts of political cleavage raises the possibility of politicization (e.g. Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1990). Rather, the focus is principally on how certainty is co-constructed and used as a mechanism to depoliticize the possibilities of sociotechnical co-construction open in the present. It is not only a matter of seeing politics in spaces of uncertainty, but also (and primarily) in the very mechanisms of establishing certainty in political arenas – especially when this establishment applies to events that are open to (non-)occurrence (Rubino, 2000). Restricting the aperture to scrutinizing only those spaces that are considered uncertain implies shielding from scrutiny those spaces that are typically considered certain on the basis of purely scientific and technical criteria, as if the production of certainty were completely detached from political values and concerns. Refusing to problematize the politics underlying the mechanisms of fixing certainty entails blindly accepting that the production and fixation of a large part of the assumptions and facts about the future are settled and normative-free.

The co-production of certainty regarding the future has indeed been considered instrumental for domesticating ‘feral futures’, that is as a way of neglecting that sociotechnical coevolution can/might take unexpected and different directions (Ramírez & Ravetz, 2011). The mechanisms of the co-production of certainty involve the exercise of modal power insofar as they imply the removal from consideration of paths that might challenge the choices (and/or the assumptions on which those choices are based) of those in power. The call to open up modal power, however, is not (and should not be) about entering into a dynamic where ‘anything goes’ (or where everything is considered equally valid). Rather, it is about taking seriously the mechanisms for determining the realms of the (im)plausible and the (un)desirable by exposing them to discussion and transparency. Key questions in this regard are: Who determines the realms of the (im)plausible and (un)desirable? By what means and on what justificatory grounds? In relation to what problems and purposes? Whose values are taken into account, and why those ones rather than others? The call to open up modal power entails following up and problematizing the heterogeneous contents and modes with which we imagine and approach sociotechnical futures by considering how these are inseparable from our personal and socio-political projects and ambitions; from how we orient our life in the present. ⁶ It means paying close attention to how anticipatory elements such as expectations, visions, imaginaries, and predictive models engender ‘substantive’ and ‘formal’ bias (Feenberg, 2017) by embodying preferences and meanings about the worlds that should and should not be inhabited.

Widening the scope of our blinkers: The negotiation of (im)plausibility and (un)desirability as a disturbance of modal power

Although anticipation is addressed in STS from the descriptive, normative, and interventive ideal-typical approaches, these overlap in practice. For example, descriptions that expose how images of the future perform reality could be understood as interventions because they enrich existing understandings of science, technology, and innovation dynamics, thereby aiding critique and reflection. Moreover, engagements with futures performed by STS scholars are usually driven by normative commitments: They are motivated to realize more desirable futures where co-production processes articulate – and are simultaneously articulated by – more self-aware, transparent, and democratic orders (e.g. Guston, 2014; Jasanoff, 2020; Stilgoe et al., 2013).

In this sense, STS scholars not only engage with anticipation by treating it as an object of description, critique, or as a means for interventive modulation, but are themselves embedded in, and contributing to, anticipatory dynamics. Both the anticipatory dynamics that STS scholars describe, critically assess, and aim to modulate, as well as those that STS scholars mobilize through their normative visions and commitments, are involved in the politics of opening up and closing down the present patterns and directions of STM governance (Fisher, 2019; Stirling, 2008). STS scholars are embroiled in the mobilizations of modal power through futures (Figure 1).

Indeed, recent STS critical-reflexive engagements with prospective elements such as expectations, visions, and imaginaries can be read as attempts to make visible and disrupt the modal power distributions that these anticipatory artifacts promote. They confront the obscuring of alternatives by widening the scope of anticipatory blinkers. Motivated by visions of openness, STS scholars typically emphasize the existence of opportunities for maneuver by recognizing the indeterminate nature of the future and the limited capabilities of human agency to shape – albeit not totally control – the directions and forms of governance (e.g. Guston, 2014; Jasanoff, 2020; Kuhlmann et al., 2019; Lösch et al., 2019). On the one hand, descriptive studies of the co-creation and mobilization of representations of the future trace the anticipatory channels and contents through which modal power is generated, distributed, and executed. On the other hand, normative proposals typically point to the need to amplify the space of the (im)plausible or (un)desirable fixed by such representations, through the consideration of alternatives for action and the visibilization of issues or values that are not contemplated. While, as previously mentioned, both description and normative critique involve intervention to some extent, it is the interventive proposals that explicitly consider anticipatory instruments, or techniques, such as foresight, visioning or futuring practices, as means to enhance reflexivity and support the modulation of modal power.

Consider, for example, Anticipatory Governance, which uses ‘foresight’, ‘engagement’, and ‘integration’ to ‘collectively imagine, critique and thereby shape the issues presented by emerging technologies before they become reified’ (Barben et al., 2008, p. 992) – in other words, to intervene in sociotechnical systems before STM renders their modulation more difficult. In contrast to technocratic approaches to the future, foresight is conceived here as a technique that ‘aims to enrich futures-in-the-making by encouraging and developing reflexivity in the system’ (Barben et al., 2008, p. 986). Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is another normative framework championed by the European Commission that relies on ‘the introduction of a broader foresight’ (von Schomberg, 2013, p. 51). RRI ‘anticipates and assesses potential implications and societal expectations with regard to research and innovation, with the aim to foster the design of inclusive and sustainable research and innovation’ (European Commission, 2013a). Likewise, the Responsible Innovation framework defines anticipation as a central dimension (alongside inclusivity, reflexivity, and responsiveness) aimed at ‘consider[ing] contingency, what is known, what is likely, what is plausible and what is possible’ (Stilgoe et al., 2013, p. 1570). Technology Assessment advocates have also recently recognized the importance of ‘enhancing reflexivity over time’ through anticipation (Grunwald, 2019, p. 703), to democratize technology co-production processes.

These STS-related normative frameworks understand anticipation as an interventive practice that is not primarily focused on looking into the future (i.e. generating future presents), but as a socio-epistemic activity aimed at disrupting the mode and content through which we look to the future. Far from generating knowledge about what is yet to come, anticipation is used as a tool to make the sociotechnical futures presently considered (im)plausible and (un)desirable the subject of inclusive discussion, thereby opening up alternative courses of action that may be more responsive to a broader range of social actors and concerns (Urueña, 2019). Foresight aims to ‘emancipate’ (Withycombe Keeler et al., 2019) ‘the still, small voices less often heard in the innovation process’ (Guston, 2014, p. 229) in the present. Anticipation is understood in this context as an interventive tool that assists in ‘taking care of the future through collective stewardship of science and innovation in the present’ (Stilgoe et al., 2013, p. 1570). Anticipation and foresight exercises aim to open up various processes that continuously constitute and close down the STM of sociotechnical systems by setting spaces of (un)certainty. Thus, within the frame provided in this article, these exercises can be interpreted as tools for disrupting the modal power allocations which shape and sustain the momentum of sociotechnical coevolution processes.

This understanding of anticipation and foresight aligns with recent developments in Futures Studies regarding scenario development and the promotion of capabilities such as futures literacy. For instance, scenario work ‘seeks to extend the peer community by seriously considering that which had hitherto been unwelcome, politically incorrect, destabilizing and radical, along with that which questions established categories, labels, connotations, roles, sources of legitimacy and power relations’ (Ramírez & Ravetz, 2011, p. 482). Furthermore, futures literacy proposals aim to (1) identify and make visible underlying anticipatory assumptions (including an awareness of the past and present); and (2) deconstruct or challenge the dominant anticipatory assumptions in order to raise new questions, ways of framing, and paths of action in the present (Miller, 2018; Miller & Sandford, 2019).

All of these STS interventive proposals emphasize the need to disrupt and distribute the modal power that is mobilized and executed on the basis of representations of the future. It should be emphasized, however, that this disruption can entail different degrees of radicality. The blinkers can be widened to different scopes and in relation to different aspects. The level of radicality could be defined in terms of: (1) the domains of research and innovation that are problematized (e.g. impacts, processes, and/or purposes), (2) the timing of this problematization (whether ex ante to the development of the innovation, ex dure, and/or ex post), and (3) the actors and concerns involved in this process. For example, only opening up the debate on the outcomes of an innovation at advanced stages of development may be less disruptive or radical than opening up the debate on its outcomes, processes, and purposes at earlier stages of development. Approaches that appeal to the need for ‘upstream’ engagement aim precisely to increase the radicality of the problematization of emerging sciences and technologies by engaging multiple voices during the early stages of development, before the trajectory of these emerging sciences and technologies is fixed and acquires STM (Rogers-Hayden, 2010; Wilsdon & Willis, 2004). The existence of different gradients of opening up radicality implies that STS scholars using anticipation as a disruptive tool could benefit from considering what type and degree of disruption they seek to realize and which actors or futures will be left out or included (and why).

For instance, Withycombe Keeler et al. (2019) argue that foresight exercises can provide ‘emancipatory’ heuristics for disrupting status-quo imaginaries. However, the scenario-building practice through which that potential is illustrated takes for granted futures where wastewater sensing technologies exist. Similarly, Selin (2011) attempts to promote mechanisms of ‘negotiating plausibility’ – which can be read, in the context of this paper, as an attempt to disrupt modal power – and sets up a series of scenarios where what is problematized is not the political meaning and/or desirability of nanotechnology itself, but rather its concrete applications (i.e. the scenarios subtly assume and reproduce the promises of disruptive development of nanotechnology). When the political dynamics of opening up and closing down the present through futures is at stake, the question of which futures are (or should be) considered, and in relation to which aspects they are problematized, becomes central.

The ‘negotiation of plausibility’ here takes on an ambivalent or tension-laden character. On the one hand, the use of plausibility as a methodological criterion and as an epistemic and inferential register enables the futures under consideration to be opened up beyond those that could be identified by standard probabilistic criteria (see Ramírez & Selin, 2014; Urueña, 2019). ⁷ On the other hand, limiting the scope of discussion to nanotechnology applications requires assuming in advance that nanotechnology is a plausible and desirable general technological project. This second aspect implies closing down the scope of the ‘plausibility negotiation’ process from a more fundamental debate about the plausibility (or desirability) of nanotechnology itself. Although made in a spirit of openness, these anticipatory interventions may end up reproducing assumptions about the (im)plausible and the (un)desirable. These anticipatory interventions were ‘not designed to manufacture support …, but rather to critically reflect on how the technology could develop in unexpected ways’ (Withycombe Keeler et al., 2019, p. 277). However, insofar as these practices take for granted the desirability and plausibility of the emerging technologies under their respective critique and study, they indirectly stabilize the modal power dynamics that seek to benefit and pave the way for their development. Such assumptions restrict the scope for imagining alternatives and thus reify (even if unintentionally) development paths that could otherwise be problematized.

In addition to examining the scope and depth of the opening created in practice, it is also relevant to ask to what extent the disruption is effective. The factors that constitute the STM of sociotechnical systems will also hinder the potential of these inventive anticipatory practices. Like any form of power, modal power is embedded in and reproduced through complex social fabrics with deep socio-material roots. Institutions, traditions, and sociotechnical forms of organization will perpetuate and privilege actors who reproduce and ensure their survival.

This implies that anticipation, understood as an interventive methodology aimed at the co-construction of more reflexive, inclusive, and perhaps fairer sociotechnical futures, must itself be located within the sociotechnical context from which it simultaneously emerges and in which it intends to operate. The constitutive dynamics of this context will tend to privilege certain actors and render others invisible. Heterogeneous actors compete to impose their range of considerations regarding the (im)plausibility and (un)desirability of futures. Only by recognizing these socio-material constraints and encouraging their disruption during interventive processes can anticipation become an effective and realistic tool for democratizing the politics of future-making.

Conclusions

The future is a battlefield that is continuously settled in the present. However, this settlement in the present is in turn influenced by images of, and modes of inhabiting, futures. STS scholars have devoted particular attention to this phenomenon over the past three decades. STS research has made significant progress in identifying how heterogeneous future-oriented elements shape the direction, speed, and co-production dynamics of science, technology, and innovation.

Anticipation has been understood in STS as one element of the sociotechnical fabric that shapes and is simultaneously shaped by the complex assemblages in which these elements come into play. Whether as predictive-technocratic machineries and scripts embedded in technologies, or as expectations, visions, or sociotechnical imaginaries, futures representations modulate the directions and speed of sociotechnical coevolutionary patterns. Following Hughes’s terminology, futures constitute heterogeneous anticipatory dynamics that shape the momentum of sociotechnical systems.

The cohabiting topographies of futures (e.g. scripts, expectations, visions, sociotechnical imaginaries) and temporal regimes (e.g. prediction-based modes of governance) co-configure the politics of and with what is to come. These futures function as blinkers that open up/close down possibilities by modulating what counts (or should count) as (im)plausible or (un)desirable at present. In other words, futures play an important role in the political games of nudging the directionality of sociotechnical development by means of exercising modal power.

As this review has emphasized, STS scholars are not outsiders to these dynamics. They are embedded within, account for, contribute to, and aim to re-shape them. STS scholars usually are guided by the aim of pointing to alternative directions and modes of sociotechnical co-production and coevolution: Indeed, in this article I have argued that attempts to open up existing anticipatory dynamics through empirical analysis, critical assessments, or interventive anticipatory practices are primarily involved and confronted with the description, assessment, and redistribution of modal power. The laudable impetus to democratize future-making practices is operationalized through attempts to open up what is presently considered (im)plausible and (un)desirable. Once again, but in the sphere of futures, STS scholars are concerned with the politics of epistemic and normative (un)certainty.

However, commendable attempts to open up futures always problematize certain aspects and protect others, and therefore can subtly contribute to the stabilization of certain hegemonic futures. This is the case, for instance, when the socio-political legitimacy of sociotechnical agendas is tacitly shielded from problematization – for example, by focusing on impacts while overlooking unresolved issues of social justice. Anticipation can only become a disruptive interventive tool capable of democratizing and proposing genuinely alternative futures if it is able to disrupt the mechanisms that sustain current patterns of (un)certainty fixations and modal power allocations. In this sense, the present article has underscored the need to pay further attention to the conditions and modalities under which these openings occur. Relevant questions in this regard include: Which futures are disrupted, and which stabilized? Whose futures are these? Why these futures and not others?