Many scholars believe 1804 marks the beginning of Blake’s composition process for Milton: A Poem, a work whose plates were subsequently repurposed several times. This chapter reads Milton’s celebrated vortex passages as a response to the emergence of time-critical media in the early Romantic period. For Wolfgang Ernst, time-criticality refers to the temporalizing functions of media or the introduction of new temporal logics that transform how we interact with the signals such media produce. I highlight a gap between a cultural analysis of history in Milton: A Poem and a media archaeological analysis of the poem’s time-criticality by reading the poem in both senses. In addition to representing the history of Blake’s ideological relationship to history and time in 1804, I suggest that attention to the poem’s media materiality adds to our historical understanding of the first decade of the nineteenth century. Overall, my work emphasizes Blake’s history as a construction of temporal and archival techniques by delineating how time is produced by the infrastructures mediating Blake’s poem.

The Outlook argues that whatever the participant or mediatory statuses of machines may be in future research with large and complex datasets, understanding their uses and impacts at the granularity of human interaction and social accountability will be essential for attempts to integrate human and machine learning from data. It highlights the uses of the two notions of accountability addressed in this book, identifies a spectrum of natural scientists’ social inquiries that hints at their normative orientations, and argues for the use of ethnography as a reminder of human agency and responsibility.

This chapter argues that reflexivity - an introspective process in which researchers turn their engagement into an object of research - is essential to sustainability transitions research (STR). Reflexivity in STR encompasses not only the non-neutrality of its normative categories, such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘radical’, but also its descriptive categories, including ‘regime’ and ‘system’. This inherent social embeddedness, or ‘engagedness’, positions transition researchers with both an inescapable responsibility and a unique opportunity to shape their engagement reflexively. Reflexivity, which is relevant at every stage of STR, is illustrated in terms of research orientation, role and positionality. It highlights that much of reflexivity lies in the question of how - and with what kind of awareness - you are personally doing what you are doing. As a transition researcher, you are in a comparatively powerful societal position. Your choices matter and make a difference in the world.

Chapter 7 zooms out of conceptual and empirical studies of AI governance to ask if we can build a better future with AI. The technical, corporate, and legal governance models presented in this book are necessary but insufficient to endow ordinary people with the power to push back against risks and harms, and chart a course for AI for the common good. Thinking together with philosophers and social scientists in the Critical Theory, Science and Technology Studies, and Democratic Theory traditions, I argue that most people’s experience with AI is one of fear as a result of their long-standing disempowerment and alienation from the technologies shaping their lives. Attributing disempowerment and alienation to technical aspects of AI is wrongheaded: It is the evolution of modern capitalism that has widened the gap between people and the technologies that are supposed to make their lives better. Reorienting the relationship between people and AI requires a radical-democratic politics that questions hierarchy in government and in the workplace. Technology can serve as a force for the social good only if informed citizens participate in the decisions shaping their lives in the design, development, deployment, and use of modern technology, AI included.

Chapter 4 critically examines how the ECtHR has conceptualised the technological conditions of freedom of expression in its case law. The ECtHR’s practice only superficially acknowledges differences between the various technological media, treating technology as a ‘black box’ rather than analysing in depth the interactions between the technological medium and the process of receiving and transmitting information. While this may have been unproblematic in the age of the press and broadcasting, it needs to be revised now that the Internet is the leading medium, requiring a shift in perspective from legal doctrine to the social sciences. Correspondingly, this chapter reviews two leading approaches to the relationship between technology, society and law: the media theory of law and STS. The media theory of law provides a remarkable general explanation of how the historically dominant means of information dissemination influence the law, but takes an uncritical view of the technology involved and underestimates normative social structures in the digital environment. In contrast, the strength of STS lies in its use of detailed case studies involving complex interactions between society and materiality/technology via the concept of co-production, but offers a dissatisfactory treatment of the role of law.

This introduction lays out a core argument of the book: that social movements mobilize law and legal institutions to unsettle expert consensus and alter the distribution of material resources. This chapter describes how feminist activists concerned about women and AIDS sought to reset public health practice on surveillance, diagnosis, risk, and treatment to effectuate feminist goals, including access to public health resources and welfare benefits.

This chapter explores loss and damage knowledge politics in Antigua and Barbuda, one of the few countries with national legislation referring specifically to loss and damage. At the twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties in 2022, which achieved a breakthrough agreement to establish a loss and damage fund, the country played a critical role as chair of the Alliance of Small Island States. The chapter traces the role of international influences and national institutions in shaping national loss and damage policies, and finds that there are knowledge politics at play when it comes to loss and damage in Antigua and Barbuda. These include conflicting incentives for deepening the understanding of loss and damage: while a better understanding of future scenarios aids better development planning, it can also alarm large investors (often from the Global North) about climate risks, with this potentially leading to raising fears about stranded assets and capital flight. The chapter is based on twelve semi-structured interviews with national and international policy actors, civil servants, and non-governmental organization actors in Antigua and Barbuda, textual analysis, participant observations, and first-hand experiences of international climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The introductory chapter of “Infrastructural Gazing on Global Finance” delves into the often overlooked yet critical role of financial infrastructures in shaping socio-economic and geopolitical landscapes. Financial infrastructures, while typically operating in the background, have been thrust into public discourse due to events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and international sanctions against Russia. This chapter introduces the concept of “infrastructural gazing,” a heuristic that explores the socio-technical processes underlying financial systems, emphasizing their political and social implications. The approach links micro-level financial transactions to macro-level trends, highlighting how mundane financial infrastructures influence power dynamics, inclusion, and inequality. The chapter addresses the differing sections of the handbook, including the transformative effects of digitalization, the rise of central bank digital currencies, and disruptions posed by tech giants, illustrating how financial infrastructures both stabilize and challenge existing power structures. By moving beyond a narrow technical perspective, the volume emphasizes the socio-political stakes embedded in financial systems, and their relevance for scholars, policymakers, and citizens.