2024, Master Thesis

Predictions have become ubiquitous, emerging as technologies and narratives that shape our present into an age of prediction. These predictions are bound by specific temporalities. Serving as tools to navigate future uncertainty, predictions hinge upon a modern perception of an open future and a linear understanding of time. Yet, they also entail notions of circular time, by reproducing the past and by producing the futures they predict. Repeated predictions about the future, orient people‘s imaginations and actions, thus influencing which technologies are considered inevitable and desirable. Power is therefore not only exercised retrospectively – via the control of the Big Data archive – but also predictively. Therefore, binary approaches are not sufficient in resisting how power is replicated through predictions’ temporal dynamics. But by focusing on the relations within these predictive systems can patterns be broken and rearranged.

Supervision: Anna Ehrenstein, Prof. Albert Lang, Prof. Dr. Katrin Köppert