Sun-Ha Hong
Biographic Data
| ID | 134345 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sun-Ha Hong |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sun-Ha |
| FAMILY NAME | Hong |
| SIGNATURE | HONG S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8243-4974 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Enclosure and exit in new tech urbanisms
The growing political and economic influence of tech elites is not limited to computerising the city, but more territorial and monumental strategies, emblematised by lavish ‘future cities’ like Praxis Nation. These speculative urban projects advance a logic of radical separation from public space, visibility and accountability, underwritten by tech elites’ consistent and increasingly explicit denunciation of the very idea of democratic governance…
Strategic misrecognition and speculative rituals in generative AI
Public conversation around generative AI is saturated with the ‘realness question’: is the software really intelligent? At what point could we say it is thinking? I argue that attempts to define and measure those thresholdsmisses the fire for the smoke. The primary societal impact of realness question comes not from the constantly deferred sentient machine of the future, but its present form as rituals of misrecognition. Persistent confusion betw…
Prediction as extraction of discretion
I argue that prediction is not primarily a technological means for knowing future outcomes, but a social model for extracting and concentrating discretionary power. Prediction is a ‘relational grammar’ that governs this allocation of discretion: the everyday ability to define one's situation. This extractive dynamic extends a long historical pattern, in which new methods for producing knowledge entail a redistribution of decision-making power. I …
Fact signalling and fact nostalgia in the data-driven society
Post-truth tells the story of a public descending into unreason, aided and abetted by platforms and other data-driven systems. But this apparent collapse of epistemic consensus is, I argue, also dominated by loud and aggressive commitment to the idea of facts and Reason - a site where an imagined modern past is being pillaged for vestigial legitimacy. This article identifies two common practices of such reappropriation and mythologisation. (1) Fa…
Predictions Without Futures
Modernity held sacred the aspirational formula of the open future: a promise of human determination that doubles as an injunction to control. Today, the banner of this plannable future is borne by technology. Allegedly impersonal, neutral, and exempt from disillusionment with ideology, belief in technological change saturates the present horizon of historical futures. Yet I argue that this is exactly how today's technofutures enact a hegemony of …
The Moralisation of Predictivity in the Age of Data-Driven Surveillance
This paper argues that emerging technologies of datafication are intensifying a moralisation of predictivity. On one hand, this describes the growing pressure to quantify and predict every kind of social problem. Reluctance to adopt emerging technologies of surveillance is construed as abdication of a moral responsibility via negligence to inevitable progress. On the other hand, it describes the corresponding demand that human subjects learn to l…
Fuck Your Feelings: The Affective Weaponisation of Facts and Reason
This paper examines emerging trends in fact signaling: the performative invocation of the idea of Fact and Reason, distinct from the concrete presentation of evidence or reasoning, as a way to cultivate affective solidarity. Emblematic is the conservative influencer Ben Shapiro’s slogan, “facts don’t care about your feelings”: a paean to the mythological figure of emotionlessly objective truth which may then be weaponised against one’s enemies. S…
The futures of anticipatory reason: Contingency and speculation in the sting operation
This article examines invocations of the future in contemporary security discourse and practice. This future constitutes not a temporal zone of events to come, nor a horizon of concrete visions for tomorrow, but an indefinite source of contingency and speculation. Predictive, preemptive and otherwise anticipatory security practices strategically utilize the future to circulate the kinds of truths, beliefs, claims, that might otherwise be difficul…
Criticising Surveillance and Surveillance Critique: Why privacy and humanism are necessary but insufficient
The current debate on surveillance, both academic and public, is constantly tempted towards a ‘negative’ criticism of present surveillance systems. In contrast, a ‘positive’ critique would be one which seeks to present alternative ways of thinking, evaluating, and even undertaking surveillance. Surveillance discourse today propagates a host of normative claims about what is admissible as ‘true’, ‘probable’, ‘efficient’ – based upon which it canno…
Subjunctive and Interpassive “Knowing” in the Surveillance Society
The Snowden affair marked not a switch from ignorance to informed enlightenment, but a problematisation of knowing as a condition. What does it mean to know of a surveillance apparatus that recedes from your sensory experience at every turn? How do we mobilise that knowledge for opinion and action when its benefits and harms are only articulable in terms of future-forwarded “as if”s? If the extent, legality and efficacy of surveillance is alleged…
Affecting in Discourse: Communicating uncertainly and communicating uncertainty
Presence, or the sense of being-there and being-with in the new media society
This essay argues that the ways in which we come to feel connectivity and intimacy are often inconsistent with and irreducible to traditional markers like physical proximity, the human face or the synchronicity of message transmission. It identifies this non-objective and affective property as presence: conventionalised ways of intuiting sociability and publicness. The new media society is a specific situation where such habits of being affected …
When Life Mattered: The Politics of the Real in Video Games’ Reappropriation of History, Myth, and Ritual
Games borrow ceaselessly from the past to constitute themselves. This locates the medium at the heart of our contemporary obsession with how to engage the past and the "real." In tethering digital hyperreality to the horizon of history, myth, and ritual, games generate a disavowed and subjunctive engagement with a sense of "real enough." They thus resemble Victor Turner's liminoids: autotelic, bounded experiences of leisure that cultivate accepti…
The other-publics: Mediated othering and the public sphere in the Dreyfus Affair
This article analyses mediated invocations of ‘the people’ or ‘the public’ in the Dreyfus Affair, and orients this historical analysis towards contemporary debates on public spheres and digital media. If the ideal Habermasian public sphere never historically existed, how did the ‘imperfect’ public spheres of the past nevertheless contribute to democratic political participation? The late 19th century is a particularly salient point of comparison,…
Predictions Without Futures
Modernity held sacred the aspirational formula of the open future: a promise of human determination that doubles as an injunction to control. Today, the banner of this plannable future is borne by technology. Allegedly impersonal, neutral, and exempt from disillusionment with ideology, belief in technological change saturates the present horizon of historical futures. Yet I argue that this is exactly how today's technofutures enact a hegemony of …
The futures of anticipatory reason: Contingency and speculation in the sting operation
This article examines invocations of the future in contemporary security discourse and practice. This future constitutes not a temporal zone of events to come, nor a horizon of concrete visions for tomorrow, but an indefinite source of contingency and speculation. Predictive, preemptive and otherwise anticipatory security practices strategically utilize the future to circulate the kinds of truths, beliefs, claims, that might otherwise be difficul…
When Life Mattered: The Politics of the Real in Video Games’ Reappropriation of History, Myth, and Ritual
Games borrow ceaselessly from the past to constitute themselves. This locates the medium at the heart of our contemporary obsession with how to engage the past and the "real." In tethering digital hyperreality to the horizon of history, myth, and ritual, games generate a disavowed and subjunctive engagement with a sense of "real enough." They thus resemble Victor Turner's liminoids: autotelic, bounded experiences of leisure that cultivate accepti…
Criticising Surveillance and Surveillance Critique: Why privacy and humanism are necessary but insufficient
The current debate on surveillance, both academic and public, is constantly tempted towards a ‘negative’ criticism of present surveillance systems. In contrast, a ‘positive’ critique would be one which seeks to present alternative ways of thinking, evaluating, and even undertaking surveillance. Surveillance discourse today propagates a host of normative claims about what is admissible as ‘true’, ‘probable’, ‘efficient’ – based upon which it canno…
Fact signalling and fact nostalgia in the data-driven society
Post-truth tells the story of a public descending into unreason, aided and abetted by platforms and other data-driven systems. But this apparent collapse of epistemic consensus is, I argue, also dominated by loud and aggressive commitment to the idea of facts and Reason - a site where an imagined modern past is being pillaged for vestigial legitimacy. This article identifies two common practices of such reappropriation and mythologisation. (1) Fa…
The other-publics: Mediated othering and the public sphere in the Dreyfus Affair
This article analyses mediated invocations of ‘the people’ or ‘the public’ in the Dreyfus Affair, and orients this historical analysis towards contemporary debates on public spheres and digital media. If the ideal Habermasian public sphere never historically existed, how did the ‘imperfect’ public spheres of the past nevertheless contribute to democratic political participation? The late 19th century is a particularly salient point of comparison,…
The other-publics: Mediated othering and the public sphere in the Dreyfus Affair
This article analyses mediated invocations of ‘the people’ or ‘the public’ in the Dreyfus Affair, and orients this historical analysis towards contemporary debates on public spheres and digital media. If the ideal Habermasian public sphere never historically existed, how did the ‘imperfect’ public spheres of the past nevertheless contribute to democratic political participation? The late 19th century is a particularly salient point of comparison,…
Subjunctive and Interpassive “Knowing” in the Surveillance Society
The Snowden affair marked not a switch from ignorance to informed enlightenment, but a problematisation of knowing as a condition. What does it mean to know of a surveillance apparatus that recedes from your sensory experience at every turn? How do we mobilise that knowledge for opinion and action when its benefits and harms are only articulable in terms of future-forwarded “as if”s? If the extent, legality and efficacy of surveillance is alleged…
Affecting in Discourse: Communicating uncertainly and communicating uncertainty
Presence, or the sense of being-there and being-with in the new media society
This essay argues that the ways in which we come to feel connectivity and intimacy are often inconsistent with and irreducible to traditional markers like physical proximity, the human face or the synchronicity of message transmission. It identifies this non-objective and affective property as presence: conventionalised ways of intuiting sociability and publicness. The new media society is a specific situation where such habits of being affected …
When Life Mattered: The Politics of the Real in Video Games’ Reappropriation of History, Myth, and Ritual
Games borrow ceaselessly from the past to constitute themselves. This locates the medium at the heart of our contemporary obsession with how to engage the past and the "real." In tethering digital hyperreality to the horizon of history, myth, and ritual, games generate a disavowed and subjunctive engagement with a sense of "real enough." They thus resemble Victor Turner's liminoids: autotelic, bounded experiences of leisure that cultivate accepti…
Criticising Surveillance and Surveillance Critique: Why privacy and humanism are necessary but insufficient
The current debate on surveillance, both academic and public, is constantly tempted towards a ‘negative’ criticism of present surveillance systems. In contrast, a ‘positive’ critique would be one which seeks to present alternative ways of thinking, evaluating, and even undertaking surveillance. Surveillance discourse today propagates a host of normative claims about what is admissible as ‘true’, ‘probable’, ‘efficient’ – based upon which it canno…
The futures of anticipatory reason: Contingency and speculation in the sting operation
This article examines invocations of the future in contemporary security discourse and practice. This future constitutes not a temporal zone of events to come, nor a horizon of concrete visions for tomorrow, but an indefinite source of contingency and speculation. Predictive, preemptive and otherwise anticipatory security practices strategically utilize the future to circulate the kinds of truths, beliefs, claims, that might otherwise be difficul…
The Moralisation of Predictivity in the Age of Data-Driven Surveillance
This paper argues that emerging technologies of datafication are intensifying a moralisation of predictivity. On one hand, this describes the growing pressure to quantify and predict every kind of social problem. Reluctance to adopt emerging technologies of surveillance is construed as abdication of a moral responsibility via negligence to inevitable progress. On the other hand, it describes the corresponding demand that human subjects learn to l…
Fuck Your Feelings: The Affective Weaponisation of Facts and Reason
This paper examines emerging trends in fact signaling: the performative invocation of the idea of Fact and Reason, distinct from the concrete presentation of evidence or reasoning, as a way to cultivate affective solidarity. Emblematic is the conservative influencer Ben Shapiro’s slogan, “facts don’t care about your feelings”: a paean to the mythological figure of emotionlessly objective truth which may then be weaponised against one’s enemies. S…
Predictions Without Futures
Modernity held sacred the aspirational formula of the open future: a promise of human determination that doubles as an injunction to control. Today, the banner of this plannable future is borne by technology. Allegedly impersonal, neutral, and exempt from disillusionment with ideology, belief in technological change saturates the present horizon of historical futures. Yet I argue that this is exactly how today's technofutures enact a hegemony of …
Prediction as extraction of discretion
I argue that prediction is not primarily a technological means for knowing future outcomes, but a social model for extracting and concentrating discretionary power. Prediction is a ‘relational grammar’ that governs this allocation of discretion: the everyday ability to define one's situation. This extractive dynamic extends a long historical pattern, in which new methods for producing knowledge entail a redistribution of decision-making power. I …
Fact signalling and fact nostalgia in the data-driven society
Post-truth tells the story of a public descending into unreason, aided and abetted by platforms and other data-driven systems. But this apparent collapse of epistemic consensus is, I argue, also dominated by loud and aggressive commitment to the idea of facts and Reason - a site where an imagined modern past is being pillaged for vestigial legitimacy. This article identifies two common practices of such reappropriation and mythologisation. (1) Fa…
Strategic misrecognition and speculative rituals in generative AI
Public conversation around generative AI is saturated with the ‘realness question’: is the software really intelligent? At what point could we say it is thinking? I argue that attempts to define and measure those thresholdsmisses the fire for the smoke. The primary societal impact of realness question comes not from the constantly deferred sentient machine of the future, but its present form as rituals of misrecognition. Persistent confusion betw…
Enclosure and exit in new tech urbanisms
The growing political and economic influence of tech elites is not limited to computerising the city, but more territorial and monumental strategies, emblematised by lavish ‘future cities’ like Praxis Nation. These speculative urban projects advance a logic of radical separation from public space, visibility and accountability, underwritten by tech elites’ consistent and increasingly explicit denunciation of the very idea of democratic governance…
Sociology (13 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Law (5 works) · Law and economics (5 works)