What ethos informs engagement, and what possibilities for activity are realized in making? What material effects play out in informationalization? What matters?

When we theorize and study different information practices one thing becomes clear: in this dance of information, infrastructures, tools, and ourselves, it makes a difference what matter gains liveliness and how. What information is generated, how matter matures, decomposes, and re-emerges, and at what point it stops being a possibility (Steyerl, 2013) creates effects for everyone involved. Ethics is central to the ensemble of this ‘spiral dance’ (Haraway, 1991: 181). Or to put it differently: what matters is ultimately an ethical concern. Ethics is present making: it implies the act of doing something consciously. It involves the ethicality of making something of consequence, contributing to something that matters. As a result of that, ethics is also present in matter. It is embodied in the very materiality that emerges and exhibits agency. In our case, the ethicality of materials can refer to what kind of information appears and how a tool performs normativity, values, and sometimes very concrete understandings of the world. This ethicality is not merely about morality and responsibilities, but about co-creative values and ‘ethical forces that operate like analytic frames for ongoing experiments with intensities that need to be enacted collectively’ (Braidotti, 2019: 158). This book's argument is thus also relevant to ethical considerations: the ethics of making matter are performed in collective, embodied material practices that acknowledge passing (Braidotti, 2019), and transience, but also make anew.

Making information matter is not a practice that always performs the same ethical frames or sets of values. Speculative practices can, for example, create relevant alternatives to judgemental associative regimes, giving a platform to minoritarian concerns. At the same time, speculation can also be part of predictive regimes that disable the presents and futures of specific minorities. Similar ambiguities characterize information practices of association, conversion, and secrecy. That is to say, making information matter always happens in specific contexts, which also give rise to the respective ethics, value systems, analytic frames, and material effects. Since making information matter performs different ethicalities, the central question for our engagement becomes: how should information matter? What material imaginaries and visions are central to information practices? In this light, the title of this book is not just a description.