Dreamscapes and Datascapes: Maintaining a Dreamstate by Ignoring the Situatedness of an Information Infrastructure

Drawing on fieldwork in a transnational Fortune 50 finance sector company's environmental management team, this paper attends to the transformation of the company's environmental accounting infrastructure. I analyse ethnographic vignettes of situations in which environmental agents interact with financial data strategists, rendering expectations, dreams and limits of dreams mutually accountable. I am interested exploring how environmental agents socio-technically achieved to maintain dreaming of particular improvements that they were looking for in the transformation, whilst data strategists offered wake-up calls, disillusioning the dream. Conceptually, I explore Verran's take on metaphysical commitments in ontic & ontological politics in relation to the role of ignorance in reality-making. Politically, this analysis raises concerns about how the maintenance of the environmental agents' dreaming may prefigure erroneous environments, sustaining unsustainability.