Towards informational sustainability: Grasping the co-productionist nature of digitalization and sustainability

Abstract

Shedding light on the socio-material infrastructures that sustain digital societies, the notion of informational sustainability calls for attention to the long-term public value of automation technologies like artifical intelligence (AI) by shifting discussions from questions of intelligence to questions of usefulness. In this project the concept of informational sustainability will be outlined as a research agenda. It problematizes existing digital information and knowledge infrastructures, advocates individual and collective informational self-determination, and interrogates the conditions that allow certain shapes of digital infrastructures to come into being and become stable, or fail to do so. This rethinking of how we design, maintain, and repair information systems aims to encourage discussions in both academic and public spheres.