Dear air community, In the name of Hype Studies e.V. I am happy to announce the start of our monthly online Colloquium. We kick off with Sandeep Mertia and his presentation: *Dreamy Stacks: Digital Public Infrastructure, Futurity, and Failure in Startup India * /*Friday 16th October 2pm CET. */ _Free for all to join:_ Attend: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/3482356027193916?p=20JroYLBCDd69gF7J5 Room ID: 348 235 602 719 391 6 Passcode: hL7eh9fK *Dreamy Stacks: Digital Public Infrastructure, Futurity, and Failure in Startup India * /In this talk, based on a recently published article, “Dreamy Stacks” (Science, Technology, & Human Values, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01622439261485054), I ask what hype does when it becomes the state’s architecture of future-making. India’s Digital Public Infrastructures (DPIs) are increasingly held up as a model for the world. Yet India Stack is as much a dream as a material infrastructure for tethering data-driven governance to entrepreneurial aspirations. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and archival research, I show how the post-Aadhaar state presents itself as a stack of data layers promising inclusion, interoperability, and innovation, even as these infrastructures remain fragmented, failure-prone, and dependent on public subsidy. Ethnographically focusing on Rajasthan Stack, a regional analogue of India Stack, I trace the gap between promissory visions and lived experience, and show how start-ups, incubators, and data centers re-spatialize techno-futurity beyond metropolitan centers. Rather than treating hype as a distortion to be corrected, I argue that it is constitutive of DPI’s emergence and circulation. Against universalist accounts of platform capitalism and data colonialism that center scale, seamlessness, and stable data/value relations, Dreamy Stacks theorizes a speculative, state-mediated architecture of futurity and failure in most of the world./ Sandeep Mertia is an Assistant Professor of STS at Stevens Institute of Technology. His publications include Lives of Data (2020) and Putting Data Justice in Context (with Tone Walford and Catarina Morawska, forthcoming). Best Jascha -- *Dr. Jascha Bareis* Website<https://jaschabareis.net/> Senior Researcher Human-IST Université de Fribourg *Recent* Research Collective Hype Studies <https://hypestudies.org/> Towards Popular Techno-Futures. A Global Culture Perspective eds. With A.H.v. der Lippe &F. Spremberg. Digital Culture & Society <https://digicults.org/issues/112-2025-towards-popular-techno-futures-a-global-culture-perspective/> AI going rogue? An integrative narrative review of the tacit assumption underlying existential AI-risks. With C.Ackerl & R.Heil. AI and Ethics <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-025-00928-w> Ask Me Anything ! *◕**‿**◕***How ChatGPT Got Hyped Into Being. International Journal of Communication <https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/23922>