Imagining and Enacting Futures: The Anticipatory Politics of Algorithmic Governance

Abstract

This review article synthesizes social science scholarship on algorithmic governance through the lens of anticipation. Building on research in the sociology of expectations, Science and Technology Studies, and futures studies, we lean on the concept of anticipatory assemblages to conceptualize algorithmic governance as a politics of the future. Constituted through representational and socio‐material practices, algorithmic governance provisionally stabilizes particular futures as objects of anticipatory knowledge and intervention. This narrative review yields three central insights. First, research on socio‐technical imaginaries shows how states and digital elites frame algorithmic systems as inevitable, while civil society actors and affected publics often occupy more reactive positions. Second, studies of socio‐material practices demonstrate how design choices, affordances, and calibration work establish anticipatory knowledge as actionable truth claims. Third, existing research has largely focused on how algorithmic governance produces “empty futures,” which flatten social complexity into quantifiable indicators, risk scores, predictive categories, and optimized pathways. Meanwhile, the literature points to emerging efforts to recompose “lived futures.” By foregrounding anticipation, this review complements existing accounts of algorithmic inequality and shows how algorithmic governance configures not only present decision‐making but also the unequal capacities to imagine, enact, and refuse possible futures.