PhD Oral Exam - Jacob Pitre, Film and Moving Image Studies

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that predicting the future is a political act. In the era of digital platforms and amid a glut of future-oriented thinking, tech companies build competing modalities of the future, which seek to codify an imaginary and an ideology through rhetorical and material actions to preshape the future into what this dissertation terms unwanted utopias. The key aspect of this corporate project is to secure their place in the market, a future position which fundamentally holds both value and virtue. As compelling as these narratives have been for investors and the general public alike, as evidenced through the case studies of TikTok, Disney+, and Twitch, this dissertation argues that the power to influence the shape of what’s to come is not so easily engineered.

Disney+ provides a moral-economic framework for (re-)positioning the platform brand as guiding principle for the future of media and social responsibility alike. By aligning legacy and futurity, Disney+ is imagined as the uniquely-qualified arbiter of a better future that is brought to bear on the global media marketplace. TikTok maintains a model of platform sociality as organized by content ties rather than social ties, reformulating social relations into an architecture where the self is not only completely commodified and algorithmized, but rendered antisocial from its fragmentation and perpetual iterative circulation, into an endlessly refreshed presentness. Twitch demonstrates the need for a move from “what is labour” to “when is labour,” because work happens on platforms when you are paid, further articulating how the future of work is imagined by the platform economy.

Analysis of temporal modes of technopolitics is necessary for understanding how this form of power is wielded within the platform economy according to existing capitalist logics. An examination of the process of uneven future-making, then, can chart a way forward for genuine alternatives.