The introduction of the academic book entitled "Living with monster", starts with this idea that "monster metaphor allows reframing and questioning both of our object of re- search and of ourselves. It brings attention to the ambivalence of technology as our creation.". Listing a long series of issues regarding concerns, problems and fear regarding digital technologies, the authors of that piece highlight the importance of cautionary tales and more reflection about big data, social media platforms, algorithms, platform architectures. Using figures such a Frankenstein's creature, the sorcerer’s apprentice, or the juggernaut, they explain how "attending to monsters is a way of reading a culture’s fears, desires, anxieties and fantasies as ex- pressed in the monsters it engenders".

Another chapter in that book – called A Bestiary of Digital Monsters – written by Rachel Douglas-Jones and her colleagues presents their own set of "sociotechnical ‘beasts’ arising in collaborative research project on new data relations in Denmark". Inspired both by J.J. Cohen’s work on "Monster Culture" and Donna Haraway’s work on the ‘promise’ of monsters, they put forward the idea that a bestiary of technologies can help "exploring the sites where the monstrous is made" and "act as a gathering point, an object around which further communal exploration of life in the digital can take place."

Here are some of the creatures they describe in their work about how "societal relations" are reinvented through the use of big data and digitization in the public sector:

• Codice Crepitus: a breed between the software engineering practice ‘DevOps’ and the Danish Processing Authority, which tries both "to build the capacity to ‘take home’ critical systems" and "create new global dependencies."
• Digitalis Dementore: "a dampening of the spirit stalking from site to site." or "a gestalt composed of a highly limited set of sociotechnical imaginaries that haunt the dreams and nightmares alike of cutting-edge innovators."
• Data Delere, which "arose not from revelation and loud controversy about a data scandal, but instead the political, institutional and technical intricacies of how a distributed dataset could be deleted."
• Mithe: Occultis Aperta, the data centers, which take their bestiality from scale, secrecy and concealment
• Instrumentua : the infatuation of instruments, and more specifically the emphasis on "datafication through the clarification, beautification and amplification offered in the use of computational data analytics."

Why do I blog this? I find it interesting that the monsters described here are less understood as a specific well-formed creatures than abstract socio-technical entities: processes, infrastructures, phenomena. The approach adopted here is different from the one I'm deploying but it's relevant since it tackles different levels of the digital world. While my approach is more grounded in anthropology – trying to revive the epistemic gestures of folklore – I can see here that the angle focuses more on grasping cultural connotations of digital things. Another distinction is that I'm interested in creatures that somehow reflect their proximity with living beings such as animals or beasts which are closer to traditional (perhaps also Western) entities (trolls, Lovecraftian's old ones), as opposed to the mysterious entities the author of this chapter invented to describe situations they notice in their research work. Finally, one last difference is that I want to focus mostly on users' and designers' discourse about creatures (viruses, trolls, sprites, AI systems, etc.) : which entity they refer to, what kind of creatures they live with, what sorts of relationships they have with them, how do they see the agency of these entities, etc.