Digital twins and systemic acceleration: insights from Luhmann's sociological perspective

The digital age has brought about many hypes about new technology of which digital twins are among the most recent. Techno-optimistic thought proclaims them to bring about a revolution in societal management. We interrogate Luhmann's sociology about the relationship between a social system and (its) digital twin(-s). In doing so we discover that common definitions of digital twins do not go beyond long-established technologies. If a digital twin is a computer model that is fed by information of the physical system which it influences in some feedback loop, to Luhmann every computer model is one. Yet, the term points to the apparent necessity to baptize an observable difference. We identify the latest and ongoing acceleration of integrated digital systems as this difference that makes a difference. This systemic acceleration, the maximization of the velocity of self-reference, builds the focal point in our discussion of looming changes. We think that digital twins encode a power relationship. Only if society remains in control of the modes of selection can a digital twin foster its second-order observation. To this end, the engineering derived notion of a direct cybernetic wire that connects the digital twin to the physical must be replaced with a mechanism for structural coupling. A social digital twin can then act as a digital mirror that enables an immediate, radicalized second-order observation. Thus, digital twins are in our understanding the epitome of the accelerative effect that digitalization has on society.