“We Are on a Mission”. Exploring Future Imaginaries in the Making and Governing of Digital Technology.

Visions of the future are omnipresent in current debates about the digital transformation. This full special issue is concerned with the function, power, and performativity of future visions and how they relate to the making and governing of digital technology. Revisiting existing concepts, we particularly discuss and advance the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. In difference to ephemeral visions and partisan ideas, imaginaries are collectively held and institutionally stabilized. Nonetheless, we hold that they are multiple, contested, and commodified rather than monolithic, linear visions of future trajectories enacted by state actors.