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Critical Theory in the Age of Digintelligence

TRI and Weishan Cthulhu · 2026.7–8

Introduction to the Critical Theory in the Age of Digintelligence Summer Reading Group

At the height of Fordism and industrial capitalism—the early or even "classical" phase of modernity familiar to us—large-scale machine production rested on rigorous spatial enclosure and the linear division of time. Capital forcibly concentrated labour in standardized factory production lines, physically disciplining the proletariat in the dual dimensions of body and time. This mode of exploitation, based on dense spatial concentration, objectively furnished an indispensable organizational precondition for classical class solidarity, trade-union movements and the awakening of collective political consciousness. Workers' physical co-presence under one roof transformed the visibility of exploitation into the cohesion of resistance. Yet with the advent of the post-Fordist phase dominated by cybernetics, the topology of exploitation underwent a fundamental ontological transformation. The logic of capital accumulation no longer relied solely on the direct extraction of absolute surplus value in physical space, but turned toward the continuous extraction of immaterial labour, cognitive surplus and the "behavioural surplus" persistently captured by digital platforms.

Within today's digintelligent platforms and algorithmic capitalism, the physical factory in its traditional sense has been thoroughly dismantled and reorganized. Labour is dispersed by APIs, crowdsourcing platforms, outsourced data-labelling networks and algorithms for allocating gig work, taking on a highly distributed, black-boxed and decentralized form. The medium of control has shifted from visible masonry walls and the supervisor's gaze into invisible TCP/IP protocols, deep packet inspection (DPI) and covertly operating predictive machine-learning models. Against this backdrop, traditional struggles over physical space, exemplified by Occupy Wall Street, face a serious structural mismatch at the instrumental and epistemological levels, and cannot avoid losing their efficacy before the underlying network architecture in which "code is law." If exploitation no longer takes the form of direct violent coercion, but becomes interface interactions and personalized recommendations seamlessly embedded in everyday life, do the physical points of purchase for resistance dissolve along with it?

This summer reading group seeks to suspend conventional humanist moral criticism and overly simple doctrines of technological refusal, directing theoretical inquiry into protocols, cryptographic infrastructures, the planetary computational Stack and the micropolitical networks through which heterogeneous subjects operate. The "age of digintelligence" is not a convenient label for technological progress, but a field of problems that must be historicized and theorized. Digital platforms, machine learning, cloud computing, data centres, automated management and generative AI are rearranging relations among capital accumulation, state governance, mediation, labour organization, knowledge production and political subjects. These changes can neither be described simply as a replacement for industrial capitalism nor reduced to old institutions acquiring a technological interface. More pressing questions concern which institutional relations have had their scale, speed and visibility changed by computation; which forms of power have merely gained more fine-grained operating conditions through new media; and which phenomena labelled "ruptures" actually continue the long histories of management science, advertising, colonial governance, infrastructure and the division of labour. Digitization and intelligentization thus constitute new objects of research while also forcing critical theory to reconsider the limits of its own concepts.

The first line of inquiry concerns forms of control and the production of computational subjects. From Wiener's feedback and communication to Foucault's analysis of disciplinary apparatuses, and then to Deleuze's modulation, Galloway's protocol and Rouvroy's algorithmic governmentality, these theories do not describe successive upgrades of a single mechanism of power. Discipline depends on spatial partition, timetabling, examination and normalization; protocols organize interoperability through technical standards; algorithmic systems may shape environments of action through classification, scoring, prediction, ranking and recommendation. These mechanisms may overlap, but may also generate conflicts among state jurisdiction, corporate governance and technical architectures. The question is therefore not whether "the algorithm has become the new sovereign," but how computational results enter institutional procedures; which organizations translate probabilistic outputs into eligibility, risk or punishment; who holds the power to interpret, modify and appeal; and how uncertainty within models is solidified into real consequences through organizational processes.

The second line of inquiry addresses surveillance, extraction, coloniality and infrastructuralization. Data are not naturally existing resources awaiting collection; they are continually produced through sensing, logging, labelling, identity systems, platform interfaces, business models and demands for governance. Zuboff's surveillance capitalism, Couldry and Mejias's data colonialism, Browne's historical analysis of racialized surveillance, and Mbembe's political reflections on coloniality, enmity and the exposure of life offer explanatory frameworks that are not fully compatible with one another. Concepts such as "colonial," "feudal" and "imperial" acquire analytical significance only when their corresponding mechanisms can be specified: resource appropriation, legal asymmetry, epistemic authority, compulsory dependence, spatial partition and differentiated risk are not interchangeable rhetorical figures. Likewise, the "cloud" cannot remain an interface metaphor. Data centres, submarine cables, chips, energy, minerals, land, spectrum, standards, logistics and maintenance labour together constitute the material conditions of computation. Platform power must therefore be discussed alongside infrastructure, territory, rent and the costs of exit.

The third line of inquiry concerns the political economy of platforms, labour and new relations of dependence. Varoufakis's and Durand's theses of technofeudalism are examined here in relation to platform capitalism, monopoly, theories of rent and infrastructure studies. What needs to be distinguished is not the rhetorical question of whether "capitalism is dead," but whether cloud gateways, network effects, intangible assets and platform governance produce structures of dependence that traditional theories of capital cannot fully explain, and in what respects platform rent and feudal ground rent are or are not comparable. Research on platform labour brings these macro-level questions back to orders, ratings, dispatching, microtasks, data labelling, content moderation, entrepreneurial subjects and global labour chains. The theory of affect and temporality offered by Berlant's Cruel Optimism is especially important here: why can precarious "freedom," "flexibility" and "self-enterprise" remain objects of attachment that subjects find hard to relinquish, and how might institutional change address ownership, the distribution of risk, lived time and expectations of the future together?

The fourth line of inquiry turns to mediation, publics and organization. Digital politics is often described in terms of falling connection costs, faster information circulation and weakened gatekeeping, yet publicness is not equivalent to traffic, nor organization to instantaneous assembly. Kelty's recursive public asks whether publics can maintain and modify the technical and institutional conditions of their own existence; Warner and Fraser discuss circuits of circulation, counterpublics and unequal participation; Kornbluh's Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism critiques the fascination with transparency, immediacy, immersion and disintermediation through an analysis of cultural forms. Political action often depends on procedures, representation, memory, delay, interpretation, chains of responsibility and sustainable organization, while platform media may elevate "immediate visibility, immediate response, immediate circulation" into values in themselves. Decentralization is therefore not inherently democratic, and mediation is not inherently oppressive; the more important question is whether mediation can be held accountable, modified and collectively shaped by participants.

The fifth line of inquiry centres on general intellect, the concentration of computing power and technological futures. In the "Fragment on Machines" in the Grundrisse, Marx explores the tensions among social knowledge, fixed capital, labour time and the value-form; Virno further stresses that general intellect is not only crystallized in machines, but also exists in language, judgement, memory, cooperation and shared capacities. Generative AI brings this problem into view in a new form: model training depends on public texts, code, images, feedback, labelling labour and enormous physical computing resources, while these social conditions can be repackaged as private models, interfaces and cloud services. What requires analysis is therefore not whether "the LLM is general intellect," but through which mechanisms of property and infrastructure the cognitive traces of collective social production are concentrated; how rights of access, training, deployment and returns are distributed; and which layer of relations can be changed by open weights, public computing resources, interoperability and cooperative governance respectively.

The concluding discussion of AI, automation and posthuman futures does not aim to predict a timetable for AGI. Turing, Russell, Bostrom, Brassier, Land, Negarestani, Haraway, Hayles and Braidotti understand "intelligence," "the human," "machines," "control," "emancipation" and "the future" in profoundly different ways; Crawford, Bender and Hanna, Narayanan and Kapoor, and Hao continually bring these philosophical questions back to actual technologies, organizations and resource relations. Philosophical speculation, engineering judgement, industrial forecasting, political economy and empirical social research have different standards of evidence and cannot substitute for one another. Descriptive judgements, causal explanations and normative judgements should likewise remain distinct: exposing a mechanism of power does not automatically entail a single political programme, and the technical feasibility of an institutional arrangement does not establish its legitimacy. In this reading group, we seek to build testable connections among conceptual history, empirical mechanisms and normative questions, so that classical theories are neither revered as universal keys nor deprived, by differences between historical periods, of their capacity to reinterpret the present.

SessionCore Question
Session 1: Cybernetics, Control and the Birth of Digital GovernanceHow do cybernetics, discipline, societies of control and protocols constitute the historical preconditions of digital governance?
Session 2: Algorithmic Governmentality and BiopoliticsHow do classification, prediction, scoring and ranking produce computational subjects and acquire institutional efficacy?
Session 3: Surveillance, Extraction and Data ColonialityHow can we establish rigorous, rather than merely rhetorical, connections among data extraction, surveillance, racialized classification and coloniality?
Session 4: Planetary Computation and Infrastructure SpaceHow do the cloud, platforms, data centres and infrastructure reorganize space, authority, rent and exit costs?
Session 5: Recursive Publics, Mediation and Digital PoliticsHow can publics possess and modify their own media conditions? Why might mediation and delay be conditions of political organization?
Session 6: Platform Labour, Precarity and New Class RelationsHow do platform labour, algorithmic management and precarious lives reorganize labour relations and collective action?
Session 7: General Intellect and Resistance to Compute ConcentrationHow is collectively produced social intelligence turned into fixed capital and infrastructure, and how might it be made public again?
Session 8: Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Posthuman FuturesHow can we distinguish AI's actual capabilities, industrial hype, arguments about risk and visions of posthuman futures?

Part I: The Topology of Control (Weeks 1–2)

Session 1: Cybernetics, Control and the Birth of Digital Governance

This session begins with a prehistory often overlooked in theories of digital politics: before "algorithm" became an everyday word, the twentieth century had already developed an intellectual vocabulary that redescribed machines, organizations and societies through communication, feedback, information and control. Wiener's cybernetics, Cold War command-and-control, industrial management's demand for information processing, distributed communication networks and software protocols together constitute the historical conditions of digital governance. These conditions do not, however, form a linear chain necessarily leading to contemporary algorithmic governance. Foucault's disciplinary power depends on spatial partition, timetabling, examination and normalization; Deleuze's modulation points to continuous and variable forms of control; Galloway's protocol addresses how distributed networks stipulate operability while permitting connections. Their differences are, first of all, differences of object, scale and mechanism.

Within this genealogy, control cannot be reduced to whether a "centre" exists. Standards, protocols, interfaces, identities, permissions, hardware and law impose constraints at different levels; execution can be highly distributed while standard-setting, resource ownership and rights of modification remain concentrated. Baran's distributed communication is first an engineering design; May's crypto-anarchism is a political manifesto; Berners-Lee's Web proposal originates in an information-management problem; DeNardis shows that technical standards always occupy the intersection of transnational institutions, corporations and state power. The same network topology can serve military resilience, open collaboration, commercial platforms or surveillance systems. Its political character therefore cannot be deduced directly from architectural labels such as "distributed," "open" or "encrypted."

This session thus establishes a multilayered concept of control: technical systems may delimit operability by encoding rules, but may also depend on market concentration, organizational procedures and state jurisdiction to acquire practical efficacy. "Protocol politics" does not replace legal politics; it results from the nesting of standards, software, institutions and sovereignty. This distinction provides the basis for the next session on algorithmic governance. Only after specifying whether rules operate at the level of architecture, protocol, organization or law can we analyse how scoring, prediction and recommendation systems transform behaviour into computational objects.

Required Readings:

  1. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Houghton Mifflin, 1950. (Read: Chapters 1–2, pp. 15–47).

    [Note: Wiener redescribes relations among humans, machines and social organizations through communication, feedback and control. The aim here is not to treat cybernetics directly as a theory of algorithmic governance, but to examine how a language of knowledge for "managing systems through information and feedback" took shape. It provides a historical background for the protocols and algorithms that follow, while reminding us that some basic imaginaries of what is now called "data-driven governance" did not begin with the Internet but have a longer cybernetic genealogy. More importantly, we should first establish the original text's object and technical level, and only then look for structural homologies; whenever the legal environment, organizational actors or material conditions differ, analogy must be treated as inspiration rather than evidence. In applying this framework to contemporary digital objects, the key is to identify the level at which a similarity occurs; changes to the legal environment, organizational actors or material conditions also alter the concept's explanatory scope. Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society further grounds the "historical differences among cybernetics, discipline, societies of control and protocol governance" in institutional relations. The key to digital governance is not whether a centre disappears, but how command, feedback, standards and rights of maintenance are recombined across organizations. Execution can be highly distributed while standard-setting and resource ownership remain concentrated; network topology and political decentralization must therefore be assessed separately. Wiener's significance also lies in his refusal to treat feedback merely as a technical process inside machines: by connecting communication, entropy and organization, he formed a language capable of crossing engineering and social theory. Precisely because this language was highly transferable, it later exerted influence in management, military systems and computational culture far beyond its original engineering context. Rereading cybernetics today is better suited to examining when feedback becomes a principle of management, and when it is mythologized as a universal model of social self-regulation.]

  2. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books, 1977. Originally published 1975. (Read: Part III, Chapter 3, "Panopticism," pp. 195–228).

    [Note: This chapter provides a comparative theoretical starting point. Foucault discusses not "surveillance" as such, but how discipline produces governable bodies through spatial partition, timetabling, examination, record-keeping and the institutionalization of visibility. Panopticism depends not on a watcher constantly staring at someone, but on placing the observed person in a condition of always being potentially visible, thereby transforming external coercion into the subject's self-adjustment. We must maintain some distance when transferring this framework to digital platforms: data systems do not simply reproduce the positioning of bodies in architectural space. Instead, they may use logs, permissions, scores, recommendations and identity systems to turn action into data objects that can be computed and called up again. We can therefore ask: when surveillance shifts from "who is watching me?" to "what systems can record and process my actions?", how must the theory of panopticism be rewritten? The relation between platform datafication and disciplinary apparatuses can only be established through comparison of specific mechanisms, not deduced directly from their shared vocabulary of "visibility." What is genuinely comparable between digital platforms and panopticism is not the appearance of "seeing," but how visibility is institutionalized and enters the formation of subjects. Platform records often serve commercial prediction, risk control and organizational management simultaneously, and their data visibility is not symmetrically available to all actors. Digital surveillance is therefore better understood as a recombination of disciplinary techniques and data infrastructures than as the mere electronic conversion of Bentham's architectural model. Furthermore, digital environments change the temporal structure of disciplinary power. Conventional examinations often occur at definite moments, whereas platform records allow continuous accumulation and retrospective recalculation; a past act that once seemed irrelevant may acquire new meaning under a new model or policy. This retraceable, recomputable visibility means that digital governance both inherits discipline's logic of record-keeping and develops a politics of time different from that of prison architecture.]

  3. Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control" October 59 (1992): 3–7. Originally published 1990.

    [Note: Deleuze's "societies of control" is not an empirical prediction of the Internet, but a highly compressed model of changing forms of power. Its core is the shift from the closed disciplinary mold to continuous modulation; the "dividual" means that an individual can enter different systems as multiple data fragments, credit, passwords and forms of identity. The text should be treated as a generator of questions, rather than translating the dividual directly into a "data profile." To apply it to digital governance today, what most needs to be added is not more technical terminology but the chain of implementation: where rules are encoded, who deploys and maintains them, and which legal and market relations make them effective. Thus, in Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control," the claim that "distributed topology and political decentralization are not the same thing" is more than a conceptual issue. The key to digital governance is not whether a centre disappears, but how command, feedback, standards and rights of maintenance are recombined across organizations. Execution can be highly distributed while standard-setting and resource ownership remain concentrated; network topology and political decentralization must therefore be assessed separately. Deleuze's distinction between mold and modulation is especially useful for describing power's shift from periodic certification to continuous updating: account status, credit limits, prices, permissions and recommendations can all be adjusted in real time as data flow. Yet "societies of control" is not an umbrella term for every digital phenomenon. Modulation has analytical force precisely because it identifies continuously changing conditions of access and the partitioning of identities, while state law, organizational rules and physical coercion may continue to coexist with them. What is most worth retaining from "societies of control" is not a label for a historical stage, but its account of power's temporality: through passwords, limits, qualifications and constantly updated statuses, control continually adjusts the space of action. Control and discipline are not mutually exclusive. Enclosed institutions such as schools, prisons and corporations remain, but increasingly combine with continuous assessment and data flows across settings.]

  4. Galloway, Alexander R.. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. MIT Press, 2004. (Read: Introduction; Chapter 1, "Physical Media"; and Chapter 2, "Form," pp. 1–92).

    [Note: Galloway's central contribution is to move the question of control away from a simple "centre-periphery" model. He asks how protocols establish rule relations in decentralized networks: systems such as TCP/IP and DNS allow large numbers of nodes to communicate, while specifying which actions can occur through standardized addresses, formats, permissions and modes of conversion. It is particularly important to distinguish "protocol is control" from "protocol is law": Galloway discusses the political form of technical systems, rather than claiming that state law has been replaced by network protocols. Theoretically, his work takes up Foucault's problem of discipline while providing a conceptual bridge toward algorithmic governance, blockchains and cloud platforms. We should further ask: when platforms write registration, identity, interfaces, ranking and access permissions into technical structures, does control become less dependent on explicit commands? Extending this text to platforms, the cloud or AI requires preserving both historical continuities and differences of mechanism: the former explain why a problem recurs, while the latter set boundaries that concepts cannot cross. Protocol politics thus exhibits an apparently paradoxical structure: the more communication depends on shared standards, the more a network may be distributed at the level of execution while generating new concentrations in standard-setting, naming systems or key resources. Galloway's value lies precisely in restoring "decentralization" from a normative compliment to an analysable technical and political relation, so that topology, governing authority and ownership are no longer conflated. Protocols also shift political conflict into versions, compatibility and the evolution of standards. Who may propose modifications, which changes lead to forks, and whether older nodes can still connect are all questions of governance within technical communities. Protocol is thus not a static rule, but a continually maintained institutional process; control occurs not only during execution, but also when standards are formulated and updated.]

Recommended Readings:

  1. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books, 1999. (Read: Chapter 7, "What Things Regulate," pp. 85–99).

    [Note: The most noteworthy feature of Lessig's account of "code" is precisely that it does not draw a sharp divide between technical systems and legal institutions. He argues that behaviour is shaped jointly by four regulatory forces: law, social norms, markets and architecture. Code on networks can therefore regulate by changing the conditions of action, but its efficacy remains embedded in legal, economic and social relations. Rather than turning "Code is Law" into a slogan, we should analyse how a platform uses passwords, interfaces, authentication, defaults, payment rules and content ranking to transform an act from being "unlawful" into being "impossible to perform at all." This question is fundamental to understanding "architectural power." The political efficacy of technical structures always passes through organizations and institutions. Protocols prescribe interoperability; hardware determines the range of implementation; market concentration shapes exit costs; and state jurisdiction determines when rules carry coercive force. These layers together constitute the actual form of digital control. Lessig's four regulatory forces—law, norms, market and architecture—prevent digital governance from being reduced to "code determines everything." Architecture may make certain actions technically impossible or increase their costs, but the design and execution of code are themselves shaped by corporate business models, legal liability and social norms. What most deserves study in platform governance is how these four forces overlap: defaults, pricing mechanisms, community rules and state regulation often operate together within the same interface. Lessig's framework also suggests that the most stable form of platform power is often not a single mode of regulation, but multiple forces reinforcing one another. Commercial incentives may, for example, drive a particular interface design; the interface then changes users' norms; and law subsequently takes the platform's established technical conditions as its object of governance. The politics of digital architecture arises from this circuit, not from code possessing an independent sovereignty above society.]

  2. Beniger, James R.. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Harvard University Press, 1986. (Read: Introduction and Chapter 1).

    [Note: Beniger situates modern information society within the "crisis of control" brought about by industrialization: as production, transport, distribution and consumption accelerated, established organizational forms became increasingly unable to handle the resulting complexity, prompting the continuing development of information-processing and management technologies. This avoids a narrative in which "the Internet suddenly invented control" and places platforms, logistics and algorithmic scheduling within a longer history of management. The focus is on the economic and organizational demands that control serves. The political efficacy of technical structures always passes through organizations and institutions. This long-term perspective is particularly useful for explaining platform logistics, real-time pricing and algorithmic scheduling: these are not forms of "intelligence" appearing out of nowhere, but managerial responses to continued increases in speed, scale and complexity. Beniger thus reconnects the history of information technology with the organizational history of capitalism. Studying the so-called digital transformation must also involve examining how accelerating production and circulation generate new pressures for coordination, and who has the capacity to undertake that coordination. From the perspective of organizational history, the "crisis of control" also reveals the symbiosis between information processing and expansion of scale. Firms can sustain coordination over a wider area only when they can track inventory, transport, consumers and labour processes; new information technologies both respond to complexity and make further expansion possible. The growth of digital platforms can likewise be placed within this cycle, rather than described as a purely technological breakthrough. Information-processing capacity can therefore itself be understood as a productive condition of organizational expansion: it resolves existing complexity while opening space for centralized coordination on a larger scale. This reciprocal reinforcement between organization and information also makes Beniger an important mediator between the history of industrial management and that of platform governance. It places management technology and the capitalist problem of scale within a single historical framework. The information revolution is thus recast as a result of the co-evolution of organizational capacities and economic structures. This perspective also helps explain why "real-time" capability has become a persistent goal of modern management.]

  3. Baran, Paul. "On Distributed Communications Networks" IEEE Transactions on Communications Systems 12, no. 1 (1964): 1–9.

    [Note: Baran's article should be read as a text in engineering history. Its central problem is how communication systems can improve redundancy and survivability in high-risk environments, not how to establish "decentralization" in a political sense. For precisely this reason, it is well suited to testing later analogies in digital politics: why can the same distributed topology be interpreted as military resilience, network freedom, platform elasticity or even surveillance infrastructure? A technical structure does not carry a single political direction within itself. Through Baran's "On Distributed Communications Networks," the proposition that "distributed topology and political decentralization are not the same thing" enters the organizational and institutional levels. The political efficacy of technical structures always passes through organizations and institutions. At the scale of Baran's "On Distributed Communications Networks," this proposition requires attention to both continuity and transformation: old institutions may gain new modes of operation through new technologies, while new technologies may be reabsorbed into existing institutions. Baran's engineering argument also reminds us that a distributed network is first a solution for reliability, not a political institution. Node redundancy can improve a communication system's capacity to survive destruction, but cannot answer who owns the network, who sets its protocols or who can cut off access. Later interpretations that directly translate "distributed" into freedom, autonomy or democracy effectively turn engineering topology into an unproven normative judgement. Engineering redundancy also reveals the difference between "resilience" and "autonomy." Multipath design may make a network harder to destroy, while a small number of institutions still control equipment, spectrum and access licences. Baran's value lies in preserving this distinction within technical history, requiring subsequent political imaginaries of distributed networks to address ownership and governance rather than infer power relations from topology alone.]

  4. DeNardis, Laura. The Global War for Internet Governance. Yale University Press, 2014. (Read: Chapter 1, pp. 1–24).

    [Note: DeNardis places the Internet's technical governance directly within global politics. IP addresses, domain names, standards, routing and security are not purely "technical issues," but neither can they simply be reduced to state sovereignty. Read alongside Galloway, this work shows how protocols, corporations, international organizations and state agencies jointly produce network order. The "connection among technical design, maintenance labour and the legitimacy of governance" revealed by DeNardis's The Global War for Internet Governance extends beyond conceptual debates internal to the text. The political efficacy of technical structures always passes through organizations and institutions. DeNardis's The Global War for Internet Governance allows this connection to be delimited to specific objects and causal chains; analogies beyond that scope require new evidence rather than relying on terminology alone. DeNardis brings Internet governance to a more precise level: domain names, address allocation, routing, security certificates and technical standards have engineering properties while also constituting global power relations. Network order is not a choice between the state and the Internet; it is sustained jointly by governments, standards organizations, operators, platform firms and technical communities. Infrastructure governance therefore often takes place at technical layers that are difficult for publics to perceive, yet profoundly alter conditions of access and expression. The complexity of Internet governance also shows that the technical layer is not a stage prior to politics. How standards organizations reach consensus, how operators exchange traffic, and how certificate authorities establish trust are seemingly backstage arrangements that are themselves institutions. DeNardis thus breaks network sovereignty into identifiable points of governance, exposing both blanket claims that "the state controls the Internet" and that "the Internet transcends the state" as excessively crude.]

  5. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006. (Read: Chapter 1, pp. 11–39).

    [Note: Turner traces the historical translation among American counterculture, the Whole Earth network and personal computing culture. The book is useful for testing a familiar account of Silicon Valley's origins: the communities, individual autonomy, technological media and network imaginaries of the 1960s did not naturally lead to platform capitalism, but were continually recomposed through different organizational, commercial and cultural forces. At the analytical scale of Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, the "historical differences among cybernetics, discipline, societies of control and protocol governance" first appear as a set of concrete relations. More importantly, the account makes feedback, information and adaptation part of organizational thinking, while later discipline, protocols and platform governance reorganize these relations in different ways. Turner's history shows that the relation between countercultural communities and later digital capitalism is not simply one of betrayal. Individual autonomy, the rejection of bureaucracy, networked collaboration and entrepreneurial culture were recombined in particular organizational environments, gradually forming a technological culture that combined communal imaginaries with market logic. Understanding this transformation helps explain why openness, participation and innovation can simultaneously serve anti-establishment politics and corporate management. This history also explains a persistent paradox in Silicon Valley culture: anti-bureaucratic discourse frequently coexists with highly centralized corporations. Individual freedom is emphasized in user interfaces and entrepreneurial myths, while backstage infrastructures, capital control and labour management may become more concentrated. Countercultural legacies are therefore not simply the opposite of platform capitalism, but one of the sources of its cultural legitimacy.]

  6. Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media. Translated by Anthony Enns. Polity, 2010. Originally published 2002. (Read: "Theoretical Presuppositions," pp. 29–46).

    [Note: Kittler emphasizes how the physical conditions of media and their technical capacities for storage and transmission shape cultural forms. Read before protocol politics, his work helps prevent us from understanding code as purely abstract symbols: protocols must run on hardware, spectrum, storage and computing capacity. His media determinism requires critical reading, but this extreme position is precisely what forces digital media studies to take the material foundation of digital power seriously. Kittler's Optical Media, Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism and Barbrook's "The Californian Ideology" place the "layered relations among standards, protocols, software, hardware and institutional power" within different intellectual traditions. Kittler's Optical Media frees these layered relations from overly abstract judgements about historical eras. The contribution of Kittler's Optical Media to this problem lies precisely in keeping theory open to refutation. Emphasis on media materiality also changes the direction of analysis in software politics. The "cloud," "real time" and "seamless experience" all depend on concrete devices for storage, transmission, display and computation; these devices determine what information can be recorded, how fast it circulates and where distortions occur. Although Kittler's forceful media theory cannot replace institutional analysis, it prevents critique from remaining at the level of interfaces and discourse.]

  7. Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. "The Californian Ideology" Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.

    [Note: This article critiques the ideological form in which digital technological culture combines liberal individualism, anti-bureaucracy and technological progress. Together with Turner, it forms a historical and ideological pairing: this article examines how cultural imaginaries are reorganized, while Turner provides the historical genealogy. "The Californian Ideology" should not be treated as an all-purpose explanation of Silicon Valley; we should examine the real tensions it reveals. Through Barbrook's "The Californian Ideology," the claim that "distributed topology and political decentralization are not the same thing" can be broken down into several interrelated components. From this perspective, the claim cannot stand apart from institutional authorization and resource allocation; technical forms produce stable social consequences only when combined with organizational power. What most deserves retention is not a fixed label of "Silicon Valley ideology," but the political mixture the article reveals: anti-bureaucracy, individual emancipation and market freedom can intertwine in technological utopias. Open networks and personal computers therefore do not naturally correspond to either left- or right-wing politics; their political direction depends on property structures, labour relations, and how public investment is narrated and distributed. The critique of "The Californian Ideology" also concerns how public investment is erased from technological myths. The Internet, computers and research systems have long depended on state and university resources, yet commercial success is often retold as a victory for individual entrepreneurship and market spontaneity. This politics of memory helps shape Silicon Valley's distinctive attitudes toward regulation, taxation and public responsibility. This ideology has remained effective partly because it can repackage conflicting values as a coherent narrative: individual autonomy and venture capital, anti-bureaucracy and corporate expansion, open culture and intellectual property can coexist under the name of "innovation." The task of critique is not to seek a pure origin, but to analyse how these contradictions are provisionally stitched together by a temporal narrative of technological progress.]

  8. May, Timothy C.. "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" In High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, edited by Peter Ludlow, 41–44. MIT Press, 1996. Originally written in 1988 and circulated in the early cypherpunk milieu; read at the September 1992 founding meeting. (Read: entire manifesto, pp. 41–44).

    [Note: This text is first a document of its historical context, rather than a theoretical authority capable of independently grounding normative judgements. May imagines strong encryption, anonymous communication, digital cash and electronic contracts as technical conditions for weakening state capacities for regulation, taxation and information control, while also revealing marked libertarian and technological-determinist tendencies in cypherpunk culture. Its significance here is that it shows the political imaginary in which terms such as "decentralization," "privacy," "anonymity" and "code autonomy," subsequently reused by different camps, were initially connected. It should especially be compared with Galloway and Lessig: if technical architectures do possess regulatory capacities, why can encryption be understood both as a tool against state surveillance and as an infrastructure of new private power? May's "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," Barbrook's "The Californian Ideology" and Berners-Lee's "Information Management: A Proposal" together bring the "connection among technical design, maintenance labour and the legitimacy of governance" down from macro-level judgements to mechanisms. May's contribution to this connection lies in forcing broad judgements back onto identifiable institutional mechanisms. His text also shows that cryptography's political significance has never been singular. Privacy technologies can limit the visibility available to states or corporations, but may also weaken the conditions for implementing taxation, labour protections and public regulation. Debate about encryption therefore cannot remain confined to a binary opposition between "state and individual"; platform capital, financial intermediaries, infrastructure operators and public responsibility must all enter the analysis.]

  9. Berners-Lee, Tim. "Information Management: A Proposal" CERN, 1989. (Read: entire proposal).

    [Note: This is not a mature manifesto of Web utopianism, but an engineering proposal to solve CERN's information-management problems. It matters as an original design document because it reveals the initial intentions behind hypertext, links, network sharing and open information. Comparison with later walled gardens, platform economies and cloud services allows us to discuss how design visions shift through commercialization, standardization and capital accumulation. Starting from Berners-Lee's "Information Management: A Proposal," the "historical differences among cybernetics, discipline, societies of control and protocol governance" acquire clearer causal levels. Engineering design carries no fixed political direction. Openness, encryption, distribution and modularity can have opposite consequences in different institutions; assessing their political implications still requires returning to rights of standard-setting and modification, resource ownership and authority over fault resolution. Looking back from this original proposal to the platformized Web also reveals a historical divergence between "linking" and "controlling gateways." Open hypertext emphasizes extensible connections among heterogeneous information, whereas platformization increasingly organizes visibility through account systems, recommendation logics and proprietary interfaces. This difference reminds us that network technologies' political effects often arise from subsequent commercial and institutional structures, rather than being predetermined by their initial engineering designs. Berners-Lee's proposal also retains an institutional problem that later becomes increasingly significant: open protocols can guarantee interconnection, but cannot ensure that the information ecosystem will not be reconcentrated around a few gateways. The Web's basic standards remain open, yet search, social media, identity and cloud services can form new bottlenecks on top of them. The coexistence of an open lower layer and a concentrated upper layer is a structure that cannot be ignored in understanding contemporary Internet politics. It makes the relation between open standards and platform concentration an important thread in Web history: interconnection at the base does not automatically prevent gateways at the upper level from forming monopolies again.]

  10. Edwards, Paul N.. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. MIT Press, 1996. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on command-control systems and Cold War computing).

    [Note: Edwards places Cold War computing, military command-and-control systems and a broader political imaginary of the "closed world" within a single historical framework. His value lies not in attributing all digital technology to the military, but in showing how computational architectures, simulations, chains of command and political narratives once shaped one another. For this session, the book supplies an indispensable mediation in institutional history between Wiener's cybernetics and later network governance, while reminding us not to treat "control" as merely an abstract form at the software level. Engineering design carries no fixed political direction. Edwards's closed world situates Cold War computers within military command, simulation and imaginaries of closed systems. Computation is not just a tool; it also participates in shaping a political epistemology of enemies, environments, decisions and controllable worlds. The history of digital governance therefore cannot be traced solely through the civilian Internet: military organizations' demands for real-time information, command-and-control and systems integration were also deeply involved in forming computational infrastructures. The closure of the closed world also manifests in modes of knowledge production: complex realities are transformed into systems that can be simulated, computed and commanded, giving decision-makers an imaginary of "seeing the whole from the centre." Today's data dashboards and real-time surveillance continue part of this epistemological impulse, but their organizational structures differ from Cold War military systems. Comparison should focus on how system visualization shapes decision-makers' beliefs in controllability. From this perspective, dashboards, simulations and real-time situational awareness do more than improve decision-making efficiency: they shape standards for "complete information" and "rational control." The more systems emphasize visualizing the whole, the more they may treat local knowledge, ambiguities and political disputes that cannot enter the model as noise. The epistemological boundaries of computational governance are thus directly connected to organizational power. This systems perspective also affects how responsibility is allocated: when failures are attributed to "insufficient information" or "incomplete models," organizations often pursue further data expansion rather than reflect on the setting of objectives itself. The closed world is therefore also a logic of governance that continually demands greater computability.]

  11. Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. University of Chicago Press, 2010. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on British cybernetics).

    [Note: Through particular figures and experiments in the British cybernetic tradition, Pickering stresses that cybernetics did not have only one historical path toward centralized management, prediction and optimization. From a performative and adaptive perspective, he presents another conception of machines continually coupled with unknown environments. Following Wiener and Beniger, the book importantly puts the brakes on the linear genealogy that "cybernetics necessarily leads to societies of control": the same concepts of feedback, adaptation and systems may acquire very different political meanings in different institutions and practices. With Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, the claim that "distributed topology and political decentralization are not the same thing" can be transformed from a rhetorical proposition into institutional analysis. Engineering design carries no fixed political direction. In Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, this claim does not lead to a single conclusion, but requires comparison of configurations of power in different organizational settings, so as to establish concepts' explanatory scope and the conditions of their failure. Through the heterodox tradition of British cybernetics, Pickering shows that cybernetics does not necessarily lead to centralized control. Experiments by Ashby, Pask and others attend more closely to adaptation, emergence and dancing with complex environments, developing a technological imaginary distinct from command-and-control. This difference prevents us from treating "cybernetics" as a single political genealogy, and demonstrates that the same concepts of feedback can lead to different engineering practices and social philosophies. Pickering's "performative" cybernetics also offers another politics of technology: rather than presupposing that an environment can be fully represented, it allows a system continually to adapt to unknown environments through feedback. This stance is not inherently democratic, but provides an important counterexample to the dataist assumption that "more accurate prediction means better governance." Complexity need not always be addressed through more comprehensive models; it can also be handled through open relations of adaptation.]

  12. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT Press, 2011. (Read: Introduction; Chapter 1, "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge").

    [Note: Chun asks why software is experienced as something both invisible and apparently capable of directly commanding machines, placing its executability, interfaces, memory and discourses of control within media history. This corrects the tendency to treat protocol or code as purely logical rules: code's effects of power depend on compilation, hardware, interfaces, institutions and user practices, and "programmability" is not a frictionless sovereign command. Engineering design carries no fixed political direction. Chun's Programmed Visions: Software and Memory ultimately turns the "connection among technical design, maintenance labour and the legitimacy of governance" into a problem that empirical research can continue to dissect, rather than a diagnosis of the era completed in advance. Chun particularly reveals software's duality: it is presented as transparent, executable command, yet can operate only through numerous invisible layers of abstraction and material processes. Software acquires its distinctive governing efficacy precisely between this "visible sense of control" and "invisible technical mediation." For digital politics, analysing code means asking not only what it says, but how it is compiled, deployed, updated and embedded in organizations. Software's "executability" can also produce an illusion of immediacy, as if writing code were enough to realize an intention without friction. In fact, execution always passes through operating systems, hardware, libraries, networks and user environments; errors, compatibility and updates are normal features of systems. Chun thus returns software from abstract command to a medium with historical and material conditions. Software should therefore be understood as an institution of mediation: it turns complex hardware into operable interfaces while concealing numerous conditions of execution through abstraction layers. Users' experience that "a click makes it happen" comes from a continually maintained technical chain, not from the absence of distance between command and result. It is through this hidden mediation that software acquires powerful effects of everyday governance.]

Session 2: Algorithmic Governmentality and Biopolitics

This session moves from "how rules prescribe action" to "how computation organizes the possibilities of action." Rouvroy's algorithmic governmentality does not presuppose a reconstruction of subjects' worlds of meaning. Instead, through data collection, correlation analysis and probabilistic prediction, it produces structures of classification, risk and opportunity before action occurs. Cheney-Lippold's algorithmic identity further shows how subjects can be divided into continually updated data categories. Bucher rejects the image of "the algorithm" as a single, mysterious black box, stressing that code, training data, platform objectives, engineering practices, user behaviour and institutional environments together constitute algorithmic power. The computational subject is therefore not a person completely "known" by a machine, but an actor recoded, grouped and ranked in different institutional settings.

The political efficacy of algorithms cannot be explained solely by model performance. A probabilistic output becomes part of governance only when it is given consequences for action within organizational procedures such as loan approval, welfare eligibility, border screening, recruitment, content distribution or insurance pricing. Prediction, explanation, judgement and justification must therefore be distinguished: statistical correlation is not causal explanation, and a model's risk score cannot automatically serve as a legal or ethical reason. Amoore's analysis of uncertainty and probabilistic judgement, Eubanks's empirical research on welfare automation and Pasquale's discussion of black boxes and accountability all point to the same question: how are technical outputs translated within institutions into decisions that impose real constraints?

This session also returns "algorithmic bias" from a general value judgement to a chain of institutional processes. Training data, labelling systems, target variables, evaluation metrics, threshold settings, deployment environments, human review and channels of appeal can each generate or amplify inequality. Classification does not merely describe the world: once adopted by organizations, it helps shape structures of opportunity and social identities. Algorithmic governmentality therefore concerns not only knowledge but also administrative procedures, organizational responsibility and the protection of rights. The expansion of computability has not abolished political judgement; in many settings, it has changed how judgement is concealed, distributed and held accountable.

Required Readings:

  1. Rouvroy, Antoinette. "The End(s) of Critique: Data Behaviourism versus Due Process" In Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn, edited by Mireille Hildebrandt and Katja de Vries, 143–167. Routledge, 2013.

    [Note: This chapter is the conceptual core of the session. Rouvroy's algorithmic governmentality describes a form of governance that need not first understand subjects' meanings, motivations or intentions, but intervenes before action through data collection, correlation analysis and prediction. The key is to distinguish correlation from causation, prediction from justification, and profiling from judgement: algorithms do not need to "truly know who you are"; they only need institutions to believe, probabilistically, that certain classifications suffice to support action. Only then can we understand the real tension between algorithmic governance and traditional legal procedures. More specifically, the conflict with due process is not that "machines lack humanity," but that data behaviourism tends to transform subjects from legal and political persons capable of giving reasons and answering accusations into probabilistic behavioural profiles. Correlation analysis can support pre-emptive intervention without establishing causal explanations, making critique itself difficult: if a system no longer asks who you are or why you are as you are, but merely adjusts the environment you will encounter on the basis of past data, is a traditional critique centred on exposing ideology or correcting false representations still sufficient? This chapter should therefore be read alongside Yeung, Eubanks and Amoore to test, through regulation, welfare administration and security judgements respectively, whether algorithmic governmentality holds in the same way across institutions. Rouvroy's data behaviourism forms the core of algorithmic governmentality because it attempts to bypass the intentions, narratives and normative judgements of the traditional subject, discovering behavioural patterns directly in correlations across vast datasets. Governance can thus probabilistically shape subjects' spaces of opportunity before they have expressed themselves. A fundamental jurisprudential problem then emerges: correlation may support prediction, but cannot automatically supply reasons; procedural justice requires not merely accurate outcomes but contestable normative grounds.]

  2. Cheney-Lippold, John. "A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control" Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 6 (2011): 164–181.

    [Note: Cheney-Lippold introduces algorithmic identity to explain how digital systems produce dynamic categories from behavioural data. Read alongside Deleuze, this shows that identity is no longer determined solely by subjects' self-declarations or fixed demographic attributes, but can become a probabilistic object continually recalculated from behaviour. The limits are equally clear: algorithmic classification still draws on existing social categories, rather than being purely mathematical classification detached from history. The continuity between algorithmic identity and conventional population classifications must be specified through the origins, institutional uses and updating mechanisms of categories, rather than remain a correspondence between terms. The computational subject is not an individual fully known by a model, but an object divided into scores, probabilities, categories and behavioural traces in different institutional settings. Once classification enters welfare, credit, recruitment or content distribution, it in turn shapes opportunity structures and subjects' actions. Algorithmic identity turns identity from a stable attribute into a continually updated probabilistic classification. Systems need not establish who "the real you" is; they only need to place individuals provisionally into operable categories on the basis of behavioural traces, and use these to decide advertising, prices, risk or visibility. Cheney-Lippold thereby reveals a new dimension of identity politics: subjects may not know which category they have been assigned to, and have even greater difficulty participating directly in its definition and revision. Dynamic classification has another important consequence: identity is no longer confirmed only at registration, but can be inferred anew after every click, movement and purchase. Subjects confront not one fixed dossier but a series of continually changing and potentially contradictory probabilistic identities. Appeals are therefore especially difficult, since those affected may not even know which inference triggered differential treatment, or when. The political difficulty of algorithmic identity thus involves not only "being misjudged," but also subjects' difficulty in knowing which categories describe them and how those categories travel across settings.]

  3. Bucher, Taina. If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018. (Read: Chapter 2, "The Multiplicity of Algorithms," pp. 19–40; Chapter 3, "Neither Black nor Box," pp. 41–65).

    [Note: Bucher's important contribution is to reject the image of algorithmic power as a mysterious, unified, invisible "black box." Algorithmic power is distributed across code, data, platform objectives, user behaviour, engineering practices and institutional arrangements. This helps ground Rouvroy's broad concept of governance in concrete systems: we do not face "the algorithm" as a single actor, but a set of different software, institutions and practices. "Algorithmic transparency" must therefore also be redefined: transparent code does not automatically mean transparent governance. Predictive systems often need only construct sufficiently operable proxies, without developing a complete theory of identity; this is precisely where algorithmic identity and traditional identity politics are related yet cannot be equated. Bucher's If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics thus offers a limited but effective explanatory scale for the "institutional chain linking quantification, data production and algorithmic systems": it can identify mechanisms, but does not replace further analysis of organizations, law and material conditions. Bucher rejects the algorithm as a single black-box subject, emphasizing that algorithms are jointly constituted by code, data, commercial goals, user practices and organizational institutions. Algorithmic power is therefore relational power: it resides not only in ranking logics, but also in engineering teams' choices, platform metrics and users' adaptations to systems. Transparency understood merely as releasing source code cannot encompass this complex sociotechnical assemblage. Bucher's attention to algorithmic imaginaries also shows that algorithmic power resides not only in what systems actually do, but in what people believe they can do. Users adjust their expression to accommodate imagined recommendation rules, while institutions may expand automated deployments in the belief that "algorithms are more objective." Algorithms' social efficacy thus arises partly from the expectations and uncertainties that form around them.]

  4. Amoore, Louise. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Duke University Press, 2020. (Read: Chapter 1, pp. 1–24).

    [Note: Amoore examines how probabilistic judgements acquire the capacity to produce action in border, security and risk governance. The important question is not whether algorithms can "predict accurately," but when institutions turn probabilistic outputs into actual decisions, and how that translation changes the politics of responsibility and uncertainty. Transparency is not a single solution either. This session places explainability within a broader understanding of due process and institutional accountability. Placed in the session's overall context, Amoore's Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others gives more concrete structure to the question of "how transparency, explanation, appeal and responsibility are redistributed in automated decision-making." The computational subject is not an individual fully known by a model, but an object divided into scores, probabilities, categories and behavioural traces in different institutional settings. Once classification enters welfare, credit, recruitment or content distribution, it in turn shapes opportunity structures and subjects' actions. Amoore shifts algorithmic ethics from "whether a model is correct" toward how probabilistic judgements are put into action. Border, security and risk systems often operate under uncertainty; the key is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to examine how institutions choose thresholds, give certain attributes greater weight and allow partial correlations to have real consequences. Responsibility therefore cannot be transferred to the model: the institutional allocation of uncertainty is itself a political decision. Amoore thereby advances the ethical question into attribution itself: systems infer the potential properties of a person or event from partial traces and pre-allocate attention, suspicion and resources accordingly. Probability is not a neutral waiting state, but can become a reason for action. The politics of risk governance lies in who is made to bear the costs of uncertainty, and which errors institutions deem acceptable.]

Recommended Readings:

  1. Gillespie, Tarleton. "The Relevance of Algorithms" In Media Technologies, 167–194. MIT Press, 2014.

    [Note: Gillespie discusses how "relevance" itself becomes one of platforms' most important public decisions. Search, recommendation and ranking do not merely compute information; they decide what deserves to be seen and considered important. This adds a dimension of media and public culture to algorithmic governmentality. Theoretical similarity does not automatically imply institutional identity. Predictive accuracy, statistical correlation and administrative legitimacy belong to different levels; a risk score truly becomes governance only when it acquires consequences through thresholds, human review, appeals and enforcement procedures. "Relevance" is therefore normative rather than purely technical. What platforms call relevance commonly compresses click probabilities, dwell time, commercial objectives and content value into one ranking process. Algorithms do not directly adjudicate truth, yet can alter the conditions under which public issues emerge by allocating attention. Gillespie thus moves algorithm studies from inside models to platform institutions: what requires explanation is how criteria of relevance are set, adjusted and legitimized. Recommendation systems also have a public dimension because they alter the visible structure of a "common world." When users receive highly personalized rankings, public issues no longer have identical gateways, while platforms retain the authority to adjust recommendation goals and content boundaries. Research on algorithmic relevance must therefore connect media institutions to business models, rather than merely measure ranking accuracy. Platform ranking is both information processing and the allocation of attention; when relevance becomes a function of commercial objectives, media power enters the core of algorithmic design. Gillespie further reminds us that the normativity of algorithmic ranking often appears in the name of "user demand" or "relevance," thereby turning value judgements into technical matters. What deserves recommendation, what counts as spam and which content should be downranked all presuppose some public order. If algorithm studies ignore the institutional objectives behind these classifications, they will misrepresent platforms' most important political judgements as purely engineering optimization.]

  2. Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality. St. Martin's Press, 2018. (Read: Introduction, pp. 1–14; Chapter 1, pp. 17–36).

    [Note: This book brings abstract algorithmic governance into welfare, poverty and administrative systems. Its core is not to prove that algorithms "are biased," but to observe how technical systems reorganize the allocation of social resources and how historical inequalities enter risk classifications. It shifts analysis from "platform experience" toward state administration and social policy. Eubanks's Automating Inequality does not provide a final name for "how organizations translate probabilistic outputs into judgements with real consequences," but a theoretical point of entry open to testing against competing explanations; this openness is itself part of its research value. Eubanks's Automating Inequality also shows that automated governance first falls on populations with the least capacity to exit. When technical systems repackage resource scarcity, welfare screening and risk management as questions of efficiency, poverty itself can readily become suspicion and computable risk. Eubanks's cases show that automated welfare systems do not simply substitute machine for human judgement; they reorganize screening within existing frameworks of resource austerity, administrative reform and the governance of poverty. Technology can speed up assessment, but can also fix historically entrenched suspicion and punishment of the poor into data rules. Algorithmic fairness therefore cannot be separated from the institutional objectives of the welfare state: a system that accurately enforces harsh policies can still produce profound injustice. Eubanks's empirical material also reveals a common political asymmetry in technological reform: administrative agencies deploy systems to reduce costs and prevent fraud, while those undergoing assessment bear the temporal costs of data errors, complex processes and automatic refusals. Efficiency calculated only from the institution's side excludes the extra labour borne by vulnerable groups from performance measures. The criteria for evaluating automated governance must themselves therefore be politicized. These cases also show that automation in poverty governance produces more than isolated errors; it can change the relationship between the state and welfare applicants. When face-to-face explanation and case-specific discretion are replaced by database verification and risk scoring, applicants must shoulder more responsibility for proving their eligibility. Digitizing procedures can thus transfer administrative burdens from inside institutions to those with the fewest resources.]

  3. Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society. Harvard University Press, 2015. (Read: Introduction; Chapter 2, "The Digital Poorhouse," pp. 35–58).

    [Note: Pasquale focuses on information asymmetry and accountability in automated decision-making. His work can test whether "open-source code" is a sufficient answer: even a system with open code may remain unaccountable because of its data, model complexity, commercial secrecy or organizational permissions. Through Pasquale's The Black Box Society, the "institutional chain linking quantification, data production and algorithmic systems" enters the organizational and institutional levels. At the scale of Pasquale's The Black Box Society, this chain must be approached through both continuity and transformation: old institutions may gain new ways of operating through new technologies, and new technologies may be reabsorbed into existing institutions. Pasquale's The Black Box Society also suggests that analysing this institutional chain requires preserving differences among objects and institutional boundaries, rather than substituting concepts' rhetorical force for empirical explanation. Pasquale's The Black Box Society extends invisibility from the technical to the institutional black box: commercial secrecy, control of data, professional barriers and organizational permissions together determine who can explain a system. Explainability can therefore become real accountability only when joined to auditing, appeals and the allocation of responsibility. Pasquale's black box encompasses technical complexity, trade secrets and institutional information asymmetry simultaneously. The opacity of financial scoring, search ranking and platform decisions cannot all be solved by "explaining the model"; those affected often also lack access to data, channels of appeal and bargaining power. Accountability must therefore extend from disclosure to organizational responsibility, specifying who has the authority to decide, who must give reasons and who can correct mistakes.]

  4. Harcourt, Bernard E.. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Harvard University Press, 2015. (Read: Chapter 1, "The Expository Society," pp. 1–28).

    [Note: Harcourt discusses exposure, desire and surveillance together. Subjects' self-display should not simply be explained as "voluntarily submitting to surveillance"; we should analyse how platform design, social norms, the desire for visibility and commercial data extraction reinforce one another. Transparency is not a single solution either. The question of "how transparency, explanation, appeal and responsibility are redistributed in automated decision-making," revealed by Harcourt's Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, extends beyond conceptual debate within the text. Harcourt's Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age allows this question to be delimited to specific objects and causal chains; analogies beyond that scope need new evidence and cannot rest on terminology alone. Harcourt's "exposure" also reveals an important turn in surveillance studies: subjects do not always exist as passive objects, but actively produce visibility through social interaction, consumption and self-display. The question is not whether this activity cancels coercion, but how commercial architectures capture desire and turn it into resources for prediction and governance under asymmetric data-access rights. Harcourt makes "exposure" more than a loss of privacy: it becomes a social relation. Through sharing, searching, location-tracking and consumption, subjects continually produce themselves, while platforms retranslate these expressions into computational resources. Desire and surveillance are therefore not opposing forces: precisely because digital environments satisfy needs to be seen, connected and expressive, data extraction can penetrate everyday life in the forms of participation and convenience. The paradox of the expository society is that subjects gain freedom of expression and connection while handing ever more traces of their lives to platforms they cannot observe reciprocally. Freedom and surveillance do not simply grow at one another's expense; they may increase together within the same architecture of interaction.]

  5. Beer, David. The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception. Sage, 2018. (Read: Introduction and Chapters 1–2).

    [Note: Beer uses the concept of the data gaze to discuss how datafication changes relations of "seeing" and "being seen." This connects algorithmic classification with social perception: as life becomes increasingly datafied, institutions are not alone in "seeing" us; people increasingly understand themselves through metrics as well. At the analytical scale of Beer's The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception, "how classification, prediction, scoring and ranking constitute computational subjects" first appears as a set of concrete relations. So-called algorithmic bias cannot remain a value judgement. Training data, labelling systems, target variables, evaluation metrics, deployment environments and existing institutional inequalities may each produce different problems; only tracing them layer by layer reveals where bias arises. The data gaze is not merely an institutional gaze upon people, but a perceptual mechanism through which subjects reconceive themselves in terms of metrics. Step counts, credit scores, popularity, rankings and performance data translate life into comparable quantities that in turn shape goals for action. Beer thus connects algorithmic governance to quantified subjectivation: data describe reality while also helping determine what kind of reality deserves pursuit. The metricized self does not arise entirely from coercion. People actively organize their lives with rankings, health data and social feedback, but this voluntary use occurs within the measurable dimensions that platforms have predefined. Subjectivity therefore includes both the desire to quantify oneself and guidance by metric architectures. Beer's analysis moves power beyond an external gaze into the technical forms of everyday self-evaluation. Such self-quantification further shows that data power is often realized through subjects' active participation, rather than solely through external surveillance or compulsory collection. The power of metrics thus comes both from measurement and from people reorganizing their actions around metrics. It is precisely in this self-adjustment that the data gaze enters subject formation.]

  6. Yeung, Karen. "Algorithmic Regulation: A Critical Interrogation" Regulation & Governance 12, no. 4 (2018): 505–523.

    [Note: This article offers a corrective from the perspectives of institutions and the rule of law. Algorithmic regulation does not simply improve technical efficiency; it concerns how machines execute, monitor and dynamically adjust rules. It helps build a clearer theoretical bridge between Rouvroy and Lessig. Yeung's "Algorithmic Regulation: A Critical Interrogation," Beer's The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception and Seaver's "Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems" place "how organizations translate probabilistic outputs into judgements with real consequences" within different intellectual traditions. Yeung's "Algorithmic Regulation: A Critical Interrogation" frees this problem from overly abstract diagnoses of the era. So-called algorithmic bias cannot remain a value judgement. Yeung's contribution to this question lies precisely in keeping theory open to refutation. Her institutional perspective further shows that the key to algorithmic regulation is not merely its degree of automation, but how feedback loops change rule enforcement. Continuous monitoring can shift governance from retrospective punishment toward real-time adjustment, but dynamism may also compress procedural review and stable expectations. There is consequently a real institutional tension between efficiency and adaptability, on one hand, and the foreseeability and explainability demanded by the rule of law, on the other.]

  7. Seaver, Nick. "Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems" Big Data & Society 4, no. 2 (2017). (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Seaver opposes treating algorithms merely as technical objects that can be read directly from code, arguing instead that algorithmic systems are cultural objects jointly constituted by engineers' classifications, organizational cultures, models of users, data practices and maintenance work. This is crucial for this session: if algorithmic governmentality involves prediction and classification, researchers must ask not only how models work mathematically, but how categories such as "relevance," "user," "anomaly" and "success" are defined within organizations. Through Seaver's "Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems," the "institutional chain linking quantification, data production and algorithmic systems" can be broken down into several interrelated components. So-called algorithmic bias cannot remain a value judgement. From Seaver's perspective, this institutional chain cannot stand apart from institutional authorization and resource allocation; technical forms produce stable social consequences only when combined with organizational power. Seaver's cultural-anthropological approach returns algorithms from "independently operating code" to organizational life. How engineers understand users, which metrics count as success and how teams handle anomalies are all cultural practices that help constitute algorithmic systems. The significance of algorithmic ethnography thus lies not in entering secret code repositories, but in observing how technical objects are continually produced through everyday work, narratives and institutional routines.]

  8. Fourcade, Marion, and Kieran Healy. "Classification Situations: Life-Chances in the Neoliberal Era" Accounting, Organizations and Society 38, no. 8 (2013): 559–572. (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Fourcade and Healy return scoring, ranking and classification to research on social stratification, emphasizing that modern classification systems do not neutrally describe, but change the opportunities, prices, resources and institutional treatment available to individuals. Their concept of the "classification situation" is especially useful alongside algorithmic identity: computational subjects are not only representations in data, but occupy real opportunity structures shaped by classification outcomes. Fourcade's "Classification Situations: Life-Chances in the Neoliberal Era," Seaver's "Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems" and Espeland's "A Sociology of Quantification" together move the question of "how transparency, explanation, appeal and responsibility are redistributed in automated decision-making" from broad judgements to mechanisms. Transparency is not a single solution either. Fourcade's contribution to this question lies in forcing macro-level judgements back onto identifiable institutional mechanisms. So-called algorithmic bias cannot remain a value judgement. "Classification Situations: Life-Chances in the Neoliberal Era" places this redistribution of transparency, explanation, appeal and responsibility back within historical conditions. Similar digital appearances need not arise from the same mechanisms, and the validity of concepts therefore depends on preserving differences. Fourcade and Healy's classification situations directly connect classification to life chances. Classifications in credit, insurance, education and consumption do not simply describe social differences: they determine interest rates, opportunities, treatment and visibility, thereby producing feedback effects. What digitization intensifies is not classification itself, but its capacity to enter everyday institutions at finer granularity, higher frequency and lower visibility.]

  9. Espeland, Wendy Nelson, and Mitchell L. Stevens. "A Sociology of Quantification" European Journal of Sociology 49, no. 3 (2008): 401–436. (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Espeland and Stevens provide a methodological baseline for studying quantification: numbers, metrics and rankings compress complexity, but also use commensuration to place objects that were not directly comparable on a common scale. Bringing this article into algorithmic governance is not to claim that all algorithms are merely "scoring," but to see the social engineering that often occurs before predictive models can enter institutional decisions: objects must become quantifiable, metrics comparable and results rankable. Starting from Espeland's "A Sociology of Quantification," the question of "how classification, prediction, scoring and ranking constitute computational subjects" acquires clearer causal levels. Transparency is not the single solution to automated governance. Once commensuration is accomplished, political disputes are often rewritten as problems of metric design. University rankings, credit scores and risk models wield power not because numbers are inherently coercive, but because organizations begin allocating opportunities and resources according to them. The sociology of quantification therefore offers an important path: trace how classification standards change behaviour after entering institutions, while in turn stabilizing the classifications themselves. Espeland and Stevens also emphasize reactivity: those who are ranked and measured adjust their behaviour to fit evaluation systems. Once a metric becomes a target, it may change the object it was intended to measure. This mechanism is especially important in algorithmic governance, because deploying predictive models changes people's strategies and consequently changes future data. Quantification is thus not passive recording, but a social process capable of reshaping institutional settings. When metrics become goals of action, systems of quantification change the quantified objects themselves; this is the fundamental reason rankings and scores can generate institutional feedback. Commensuration and reactivity together constitute the basic mechanism through which quantification regimes continually reinforce themselves.]

  10. O'Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown, 2016. (Read: Introduction; selected case studies on education, employment, credit, and policing).

    [Note: Through a series of institutional cases, O'Neil shows how large-scale scoring models amplify inequality when opacity, closed feedback loops and high-impact settings coincide. This is not the endpoint of algorithmic theory, but an excellent stress test for concepts: only by placing models back within admissions, employment, credit or policing procedures can we see how errors are distributed, whether channels of appeal exist and how quantitative judgements acquire de facto coercive force. Transparency is not the single solution to automated governance. O'Neil's WMD concept stresses how models' scale, opacity and feedback properties jointly amplify harm. This accessible concept needs to be paired with more rigorous algorithm research, but it captures the core of institutional deployment: once a model enters high-stakes fields such as education, employment or justice, errors are no longer merely statistical deviations. They change people's opportunities and write their effects back into future data. Model evaluation must therefore include social feedback, not just offline accuracy. This feedback property connects WMDs with performativity in the social sciences. Model-generated judgements change educational resources, credit opportunities or policing attention, and those outcomes may then be treated as "real-world data" for the next round of training. Unless this cycle is interrupted, historical inequalities acquire renewed empirical legitimacy in the form of model performance. Evaluating models therefore requires not only asking whether predictions are accurate, but also whether deployed predictions generate new data that continually validate existing differences. The WMD framework also raises an accountability problem: when models are treated as objective tools, institutions can explain unpopular decisions as "results of the data," obscuring policy choices. Which variables are selected, which errors are acceptable and whether human overrides are permitted remain institutional decisions. Automation has not eliminated judgement; it has written some judgements into models and procedures in advance. Institutions therefore cannot treat responsibility for models as a one-off technical duty fulfilled by developers. Deployment, updating, threshold adjustments and human overrides continually change systems' consequences; accountability should cover their whole life cycle.]

  11. Kitchin, Rob. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. Sage, 2014. (Read: Introduction; chapters on data infrastructures and data assemblages).

    [Note: Kitchin restores big data from the slogan of "more data" to a data assemblage: collection devices, standards, databases, analytical tools, organizational objectives and institutional practices together determine how data are produced. This supplies the infrastructural component that can easily become abstract in Rouvroy's theory: data behaviourism does not confront naturally existing data, but objects that have been selected, cleaned, formatted and institutionalized. Through Kitchin's The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences, the "institutional chain linking quantification, data production and algorithmic systems" can be transformed from a rhetorical proposition into institutional analysis. Transparency is not the single solution to automated governance. Kitchin's analysis of data infrastructure prevents "big data" from being imagined as self-existing, like a natural resource. Data become usable objects only through collection protocols, database structures, cleaning standards, metadata and institutional objectives. "Data-driven" decisions therefore involve selection and exclusion from the outset; understanding model outputs requires tracing backward how data are produced, classified and maintained. Kitchin also distinguishes data openness from data power. Data can be technically open yet genuinely usable by only a few actors because of formats, computing resources, expertise and institutional permissions. The politics of open data thus cannot end with publishing files: it must address who has the capacity to analyse, link and turn data into resources for decision-making. Data infrastructure is itself a mechanism for distributing unequal capacities. Its governance also includes compatibility between standards and long-term maintenance. Whether different institutions can understand and reuse data often depends on metadata, formats and continual updating; this low-visibility work determines whether so-called "data assets" can exist at all.]

  12. Rieder, Bernhard. Engines of Order: A Mechanology of Algorithmic Techniques. Amsterdam University Press, 2020. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on ranking, recommendation, and algorithmic techniques).

    [Note: Rieder's mechanological approach shifts attention from the excessively broad noun "algorithm" to specific technical mechanisms—ranking, recommendation, classification—and their histories. Read after Bucher, it trains a finer-grained mode of critique: different algorithmic techniques have different inputs, objective functions, evaluation methods and organizational uses, and cannot all be described as a single omnipresent "algorithmic power." Transparency is not a single solution either. Transparency is not the single solution to automated governance. Rieder's fine-grained method is particularly useful for resisting the overgeneralization of "algorithm." Ranking, classification and recommendation have distinct problem formulations, technical traditions and evaluation metrics, and their power effects within organizations differ as well. Only by matching model types with specific institutional uses can algorithmic critique move from grand diagnosis to verifiable analysis of mechanisms. Mechanology also requires returning algorithmic techniques to genealogies of tools, rather than following only the latest models. Ranking, matching, clustering and recommendation all have longer histories and have produced different bodies of engineering common sense. Understanding technical genealogies helps distinguish governance effects arising from machine learning's new capabilities from those that actually derive from earlier information retrieval, statistical classification or database management. Such technical disaggregation also supplies more precise objects for governance: different mechanisms of ranking, matching and classification should face different requirements for transparency, auditing and responsibility. Rieder's emphasis on algorithmic techniques can also change auditing methods. Instead of requiring an abstract "algorithm" to be transparent as a whole, we can separately examine input data, ranking functions, feedback signals and organizational objectives. This disaggregation links responsibility to specific stages and frees critique from a binary choice between "black boxes are unknowable" and "releasing the code solves everything."]

Part II: Extraction, Coloniality and Infrastructure (Weeks 3–4)

Session 3: Surveillance, Extraction and Data Coloniality

This session further situates algorithmic governance within data production, resource extraction, and historical inequality. Zuboff's surveillance capitalism emphasizes how behavioral data become predictive assets; Couldry and Mejias's data colonialism places data relations within a longer history of colonial appropriation. Starting from the historical continuity of slavery, racialized identification, and surveillance technologies, Browne reveals how systems of classification embed differentiated visibility and exposure. These accounts are not equivalent: capital accumulation, colonial appropriation, racialized governance, and biopolitics have distinct historical mechanisms. Juxtaposing these concepts means testing what each can explain about the data economy and when an overextended analogy obscures differences.

Data extraction is not simply an exchange occurring after "user consent," either. Through identity systems, defaults, tracking infrastructure, advertising markets, data brokers, and network effects, platforms continually convert everyday actions into records that can be stored, linked, and used for prediction. Groups bear unequal risks when they are recorded, identified, or excluded; classifications in biometrics, credit scoring, targeted advertising, and public administration bring existing social differences into technical processes. Noble, Benjamin, Magnet, Dencik, and others approach these problems through information retrieval, racial technologies, identification, and data justice. "Data bias" consequently becomes more than model error: it is part of social classification, resource allocation, and relations of power.

Mbembe is not used here to produce facile analogies such as "account suspension equals digital death." He supplies a political context for understanding coloniality, enmity, borders, and differentiated exposure. An analysis of data coloniality holds only where compulsory dependence, relations of appropriation, epistemic authority, legal asymmetry, and exit costs can be specified. This session therefore does not seek the most dramatic historical name for digital society. It clarifies how datafication connects observation, extraction, classification, and governance, and how these mechanisms inherit or reorganize earlier structures of power in different institutional settings.

Required Readings:

  1. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019. (Read: Chapter 3, "The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus," pp. 63–96).

    [Note: Zuboff's concept of "behavioral surplus" connects data governance with capital accumulation. Focus on how she distinguishes user behavior, data extraction, prediction products, and commercialization. We must therefore test whether this model applies to the entire digital economy or chiefly explains the extractive mechanisms of Google and advertising platforms. Chapter 3 requires unpacking the whole argumentative chain of behavioral surplus: users leave behavioral traces in obtaining services; firms turn data exceeding the immediate needs of service improvement into additional inputs; computation then produces products predicting future behavior. What needs testing is whether this chain generalizes beyond advertising platforms and whether surveillance capitalism flattens differences among states, finance, logistics, and nonadvertising platforms. Read Zuboff as a strong model rather than a general theory of the digital economy: in which industries is it most explanatory, and where must platform capitalism, data colonialism, or administrative automation supplement it? A valid conceptual transfer must specify mechanisms such as coercion, ownership, spatial control, hierarchies of knowledge, or resource flows, while acknowledging important differences between classical colonial rule and platform data relations. Zuboff's behavioral surplus brings user activity, data extraction, and prediction markets into one process of capital accumulation. Its theoretical ambition extends far beyond online advertising, generating debate over whether surveillance capitalism has been overgeneralized. The most productive reading distinguishes businesses genuinely dependent on behavioral prediction from platforms whose revenues come chiefly from infrastructure rents, transaction commissions, or monopoly pricing, rather than fitting the entire digital economy into the concept.]

  2. Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. The Costs of Connection. Stanford University Press, 2019. (Read: Chapter 2, "Cloud Empire," pp. 37–68; Chapter 3, "The Coloniality of Data Relations"; Chapter 5, pp. 167–208).

    [Note: Couldry and Mejias use data colonialism to describe the ongoing conversion of social life into extractable data. "Cloud Empire" particularly suits this session because it connects clouds, platforms, data extraction, and social relations. The central questions are whether data colonialism can provide a historical framework for cloud infrastructure and where this framework may overextend the analogy with classical colonialism. The authors place data relations within a longer history of colonial resource appropriation, stressing the continuous translation of social life itself into commercially usable data flows. "Cloud empire" names the infrastructure and corporate power supporting this relation. We cannot merely seize on the forceful word "colonialism": we must closely read how the analogy is built through the appropriation of social life, the normalization of data extraction, and a new social order. Alongside Browne, ask whether a generalized colonial model centered solely on extraction overlooks historical differences, given coloniality's enduring entanglement with racialization, territorial appropriation, and violent rule. Surveillance has no single central agent. National security, advertising, employer management, financial risk control, and social platforms may share data and technologies, yet have different legal mandates and interests; one concept of surveillance capitalism must not erase these institutional differences. Describing data relations as a new form of colonial appropriation emphasizes how everyday life itself continually becomes an extractable resource. The concept's strength is connecting capital accumulation and relations of subjectivity; its risk is flattening historical colonialism's differences of violence, territory, and race. A valid comparison therefore specifies mechanisms of appropriation, resource flows, and structures of dependence rather than borrowing only the moral force of "colonial."]

  3. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015. (Read: Introduction; Chapters 1–2).

    [Note: Browne extends the historical depth of surveillance studies into slavery, racialized identification, and the continuous management of Black bodies, resisting accounts of digital surveillance as an entirely new problem that suddenly arrived with the internet. Her claim is not that all surveillance is alike, but that modern identification, border management, and regimes of visibility inherit and reorganize earlier technologies of racialized rule. Between Zuboff and data colonialism, this raises the question of whether explanations centered on commercial extraction adequately account for historical differences in surveillance power. Being seen and being datafied are also distinct. Many governing systems derive their power precisely from invisible backend classification and inference; critique must therefore investigate classificatory opportunities, risk distribution, and epistemic authority as well as privacy exposure. In Browne's Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, the analytical gains and nonnegotiable historical limits of colonial analogy are consequently more than conceptual questions. The politics of extraction arise from asymmetry: some actors control collection, linkage, inference, and reuse, while others appear chiefly as those recorded, classified, and predicted. Privacy is only one layer; property rights, epistemic authority, and conditions of exit are equally important. Browne also forces surveillance history to revisit the historical continuity of race and the body. Biometrics, border checks, and database classifications seem to rely on new technologies, but who must be identified, who counts as a risk, and who must prove their identity have never been technically neutral arrangements. The history of digital surveillance must therefore trace the longer institutional genealogy of visibility and racialized rule rather than begin with internet firms. Browne's dark sousveillance also preserves resistance: monitored people do not merely accept surveillance but develop practices of counteridentification, counterrecording, and recoding visibility. Surveillance history is thus not only the history of expanding power but also that of classified subjects continually disrupting classification—a crucial point for research on digital identity and biometrics.]

  4. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Duke University Press, 2019. Originally published in French as Politiques de l'inimitié in 2016. (Read: Introduction; "Necropolitics"; selected chapters on enmity, borders, and exposure).

    [Note: Mbembe's necropolitics concerns sovereignty, war, coloniality, and the political conditions under which lives are differentially exposed to death and injury. Applied to digital and intelligent technologies, it must never simply rename account bans, downranking, or platform exclusion "digital death": such analogies weaken the concept's historical force and obscure actual relations of violence. A more rigorous transfer asks how datafied borders, automated risk judgments, militarized surveillance, and resource allocation help produce different degrees of exposure, vulnerability, and freedom of action. Further questions concern who determines data standards, servers, models, and research agendas, and whether researched communities can exit, refuse, revise, and govern jointly. In the context of this session, Mbembe's Necropolitics gives a more concrete structure to the question of bringing data justice, epistemic authority, and differentiated exposure into one research framework. Extraction is political because relations are asymmetric: some actors control collection, linkage, inference, and reuse, while others appear chiefly as recorded, classified, and predicted subjects. Privacy is one layer; property rights, epistemic authority, and exit conditions matter equally. Necropolitics examines how sovereignty organizes life through exposure to death, warlike spaces, and differentiated conditions of survival; its historical background far exceeds digital governance. Within data coloniality, the theory should not inflate account bans or downranking into "digital death," but investigate when digital infrastructures enter borders, policing, war, or resource allocation and connect with actual biopolitics and necropolitics. Mbembe is therefore most useful here for calibrating scale. Datafied governance enters a necropolitical problem space only when linked to closed borders, military strikes, policing risks, or unequal distributions of basic resources. Retaining the concept in this intensive biopolitical context prevents digital critique from borrowing the rhetoric of death at the cost of historical weight.]

Recommended Readings:

  1. Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019. (Read: Introduction and Chapter 1).

    [Note: This connects algorithms with racialized power, supplementing Noble's approach through information retrieval. It reminds us that general intellect is not an undifferentiated "common human resource": whose knowledge, languages, and embodied experience most readily become training data is itself political. Theoretical resemblance does not automatically establish institutional identity. Benjamin's Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code therefore explains the historical relations among extraction, surveillance, racialized classification, and coloniality only insofar as corresponding institutional mechanisms can be identified empirically. The "New Jim Code" makes technological neutrality itself an object of critique: inequality need not appear as explicit discriminatory rules but may persist through apparently objective efficiency, optimization, and risk management. Benjamin accordingly situates algorithms within existing structures of housing, education, policing, and employment; technology's social consequences depend on the institutional histories it enters. Abolitionist tools also differ from mere fairness repairs. The question is not how existing systems can operate more evenly across groups, but whether some systems inherently serve unequal classification and punishment. Technological governance thus involves improving models and more fundamental institutional choices: which judgments should never be delegated to automation? Benjamin's abolitionist orientation is particularly useful in distinguishing technological reform from institutional reform. Even if a predictive system achieves statistical fairness across groups, fairness metrics cannot answer the deeper question of legitimacy when the system's purpose is to expand punishment, exclusion, or overpolicing. Technology ethics must therefore preserve the institutional negation that asks whether the system should exist at all.]

  2. Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression. NYU Press, 2018. (Read: Introduction, pp. 1–14).

    [Note: Noble shows that algorithmic ranking does not operate in a vacuum: it amplifies existing social prejudices. Unlike Crawford's data/labor perspective, it emphasizes classification and the politics of representation in information environments. Surveillance has no single central agent. Noble's Algorithms of Oppression offers not a final name for the mechanisms through which commercial datafication and state governance coexist rather than replace one another, but a theoretical opening testable against competing explanations; this openness is itself part of its research value. The central contribution of Noble's Algorithms of Oppression is not merely demonstrating biased search results. It shows how commercial ranking, advertising logic, and social representation jointly shape "relevance." Search becomes a site where cultural classification and market incentives overlap; racialized representation is not simply a data error. Through search engines, Noble shows how commercial ranking can repackage racial and gender prejudice as the "most relevant" results. Search is no neutral mirror of public knowledge: advertising markets, content ecologies, and platform design shape its classifications. Representation is therefore more than a cultural issue; when search becomes an entry point for understanding groups and social facts, ranking power also becomes epistemic power. Noble's cases further reveal infrastructure's cumulative effects. Search results respond to existing content while influencing subsequent clicks, content production, and public understanding, reinforcing certain associations. Using past behavior as a relevance signal can technologize prejudice through feedback loops. Algorithmic ranking both processes information and produces future information environments. The politics of search also concern epistemic authority. Once a platform organizes vast information algorithmically, users can easily take what appears first as the world's own natural ordering. Noble reveals this naturalization through the interface: technical ranking gives commercial and social biases the appearance of objectivity, making them harder to recognize as institutional choices.]

  3. Lyon, David. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Polity, 2007. (Read: Introduction; chapters on surveillance as social sorting).

    [Note: Lyon gives surveillance studies a conceptual framework broader than "being seen," emphasizing surveillance as an institutional process of collecting information, classification, and social sorting. This is a useful foundation because platforms, states, and commercial databases often need not watch individuals continuously: they allocate opportunities through categories of identity, risk, consumption, and eligibility. Being seen and being datafied are distinct. Through Lyon's Surveillance Studies: An Overview, the analytical gains and nonnegotiable historical limits of colonial analogy enter organizational and institutional analysis. At the scale of Lyon's Surveillance Studies: An Overview, those gains and limits require attention to continuity and transformation together: old institutions acquire new operations through new technologies, while new technologies may also be reabsorbed into existing institutions. The value of Lyon's Surveillance Studies: An Overview is understanding surveillance as a relation of social organization rather than a single device. Identification, classification, visibility, and institutional purposes together determine surveillance's forms, furnishing a basis for comparing commercial platforms, state administration, and security systems. Lyon treats surveillance as social classification and organizational practice rather than mere "watching." Modern surveillance uses identity records, databases, and risk categories to allocate different treatment and rights of movement. Digital technology extends this capacity while continuing surveillance's long alliance with administrative organization. Situating surveillance studies within this sociological tradition helps avoid technocentric narratives confined to cameras, platforms, or privacy.]

  4. Andrejevic, Mark. Automated Media. Routledge, 2020. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on automation, surveillance, and decision systems).

    [Note: Andrejevic examines how automated media increasingly delegate perception, analysis, and response to data-intensive systems. The point is not to announce human replacement by machines, but to analyze how institutions expand monitoring beyond human processing capacity and manage information environments through automated correlations and predictions. Reading this alongside Zuboff distinguishes more carefully the relations among accumulation, media automation, and governing capacity. The question of bringing data justice, epistemic authority, and differentiated exposure into one framework, raised by Andrejevic's Automated Media, exceeds an internal conceptual debate. It therefore remains subject to empirical evidence and competing explanations beyond Andrejevic's Automated Media. Automated media's central problem is consequently not machine autonomy, but which judgments cease to receive public explanation when perception-analysis-response chains are compressed. Large-scale automation greatly expands monitoring and response, yet can distance the grounds of decisions from those affected. Andrejevic emphasizes precisely this politics of scale: automation changes how much institutions can see, how quickly they process it, and under what conditions they act. Automated media also alter political action's timescale. Systems flag, block, or recommend before humans understand; institutions may increasingly rely on machines reacting first and explanations arriving later. Speed becomes a resource of power: organizations that process enormous signal volumes in real time have a structural advantage over individuals who can only appeal afterward. The politics of automation must analyze this temporal asymmetry too. Once speed combines with institutional coercion, new procedural problems arise: flags occur instantly, while explanation and correction take a long time. Asymmetrical appeal costs thus become a significant measure of automated governance.]

  5. Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. Yale University Press, 2011. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on behavioral targeting and audience classification).

    [Note: Beginning with organizational changes in advertising, Turow traces how audiences are segmented, valued, and continually targeted. This supplies an important industrial history for surveillance capitalism: extraction was not invented in a vacuum but connects with advertising markets, audience measurement, customer relationship management, and differential pricing. "Identity" here is primarily a commercial classification, not necessarily subjective self-identification. At the analytical scale of Turow's The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth, the historical relations among extraction, surveillance, racialized classification, and coloniality first appear as concrete relationships. This industry's history also shows that data's value does not naturally reside in individual behavior: it is produced through market categories and tradable audience imaginaries. "High-value users," "customers likely to churn," and "high-risk populations" are categories organizations construct for specific purposes. Individualized marketing and social stratification may therefore reinforce one another on the same infrastructure rather than constitute independent processes. Turow's industrial history reveals personalization's other face: finer segmentation enables more differentiated treatment. Personalized recommendations not only improve matching efficiency but can allocate different prices, discounts, and information environments to different consumers. The boundary between commercial classification and stratified opportunity becomes blurred, giving advertising technology broader effects of social sorting. Advertising technology allocates not just product information but the attention and discounts businesses consider worth investing in, so commercial valuation directly participates in social differentiation.]

  6. van Dijck, José. "Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology" Surveillance & Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 197–208. (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Van Dijck distinguishes datafication, dataism, and dataveillance, helping us see "everything can become data" as both technical practice and cultural ideology with epistemological commitments. Data do not automatically possess the status of truth; platforms' and research institutions' trust in large-scale behavioral data itself requires explanation. This illuminates Rouvroy's governance through correlation, but here the emphasis is on the knowledge-cultural conditions legitimizing extraction. Van Dijck's "Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology," Turow's The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth, and D'Ignazio's Data Feminism place the coexistence rather than mutual displacement of commercial datafication and state governance within different intellectual traditions. Surveillance has no single central agent. Van Dijck's article releases these mechanisms from overly abstract diagnoses of an era. Dataism matters because it elevates datafication from a technical operation into an epistemological belief: if records are comprehensive enough and computation complex enough, social behavior seemingly becomes directly apprehensible. Critiquing this belief supplies algorithmic governance with a necessary epistemological dimension. Data volume cannot replace conceptual choices; correlation cannot itself answer questions of causality, meaning, or legitimacy.]

  7. D'Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. MIT Press, 2020. (Read: Introduction; Chapters 1–3).

    [Note: D'Ignazio and Klein place data practices within feminist intersectional analysis, emphasizing power, context, embodiment, and omitted experience. Rather than a generic AI fairness manual, this asks researchers who defines datasets, who is recorded, who is absent, and who bears classification's consequences. Alongside Browne, Benjamin, and Noble, it moves critique from system bias to the politics of data production itself. Being seen and being datafied are distinct. Through D'Ignazio's Data Feminism, the analytical gains and nonnegotiable historical limits of colonial analogy can be separated into interrelated elements. From D'Ignazio's Data Feminism, those gains and limits cannot stand apart from institutional authorization and resource distribution: technical forms produce durable social consequences only when combined with organizational power. Data Feminism embeds power analysis directly in data practices. From posing questions through classification and visualization to interpretation, it tracks who is represented, who is omitted, and who bears consequences. More data on women or minorities are not a sufficient answer; existing power structures and binary classifications must be challenged. Data justice therefore concerns not just correcting bias but redesigning knowledge production's purposes and participatory relations. Data Feminism particularly emphasizes context and pluralism. Detached from collection contexts, datasets readily abstract particular social relations into natural facts, while plural epistemic positions expose this abstraction's costs. Democratizing data practice thus entails more than open downloads: it includes documenting provenance, retaining uncertainty, and involving affected groups in defining problems.]

  8. Birhane, Abeba. "Algorithmic Colonization of Africa" SCRIPTed 17, no. 2 (2020). (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Birhane uses algorithmic colonization to describe asymmetrical power reproduced when digital technologies enter African societies through universalist, developmentalist, and efficiency discourses. Outside actors often control technology, capital, data, and standards, while affected communities become deployment sites or data sources. This speaks directly to Couldry and Mejias's data colonialism and insists that "colonial" must be demonstrated through specific ownership, epistemic authority, and institutional dependence, not merely used rhetorically. Birhane's "Algorithmic Colonization of Africa," D'Ignazio's Data Feminism, and Ricaurte's "Data Epistemologies, the Coloniality of Power, and Resistance" move the integration of data justice, epistemic authority, and differentiated exposure from macro-level judgment to mechanisms. Birhane's contribution is precisely to bring that broad judgment back to identifiable institutional mechanisms. Her article also resituates the question historically: similar digital appearances need not have identical mechanisms, and conceptual validity depends on preserving differences. Birhane returns "colonial" from metaphor to institutional relations: who designs models, cloud services, and standards, who defines knowledge needs, and where technological gains flow are concrete grounds for assessing coloniality. Algorithmic colonization then describes not all transnational technological circulation but persistent asymmetrical dependence and its erosion of local knowledge, autonomy, and public capacity.]

  9. Ricaurte, Paola. "Data Epistemologies, the Coloniality of Power, and Resistance" Television & New Media 20, no. 4 (2019). (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Ricaurte connects datafication to the coloniality of power, emphasizing knowledge production as well as resource extraction: what can be known, how it is classified, and who may define data results as social reality. This moves data colonialism beyond an economic metaphor toward epistemic authority and importantly introduces Latin American decolonial theory into data studies. Ricaurte's "Data Epistemologies, the Coloniality of Power, and Resistance" gives clearer causal layers to the historical relations among extraction, surveillance, racialized classification, and coloniality. She further situates data within knowledge production's coloniality: not all worlds are datafied alike, and not all forms of knowledge enter databases and models without loss. Choosing categories, variables, and measurable objects already embeds epistemological politics within infrastructure. Resistance therefore concerns not only privacy or property, but who may determine what counts as knowledge. This critique also concerns data sovereignty. If local communities supply only raw data while outside institutions monopolize categories, model design, and interpretation, knowledge production reproduces a center-periphery structure. Decolonization must redistribute power over research agendas, infrastructure, and interpretation, not merely add representative data. Data decolonization accordingly includes infrastructure: epistemic autonomy remains limited when computing, storage, and modeling depend on external actors. Data infrastructure itself becomes contested terrain for knowledge politics and decolonial practice. Rights over knowledge and infrastructure cannot be cleanly separated here.]

  10. Magnet, Shoshana Amielle. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Duke University Press, 2011. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on fingerprinting, facial recognition, and biometric failure).

    [Note: Through biometrics, Magnet shows how supposedly objective identity depends on databases, sensors, thresholds, and existing social classifications. Failure is more than an engineering error: it is distributed unevenly across bodies and may recode race, gender, and nationality as problems of identification. This supplies a highly concrete technical object for broader surveillance/data coloniality analyses. Surveillance has no single central agent. Biometrics particularly clearly reveal a loop between categories and bodies: systems train and validate against existing demographic categories, then return those categories to borders, security, and identity regimes as technical identification. Failure rates are not merely engineering defects; when identification carries compulsory consequences, errors are distributed unevenly along existing social differences. Magnet emphasizes that failure is no accidental event outside the system. When biometrics are declared objective, automatic, and universal, institutions treat misidentification as individual abnormality rather than a classificatory problem. Technical failure is thus politically distributed: some bodies must bear greater costs of verification, suspicion, and proving themselves. Accuracy must be assessed alongside these unequal consequences. Political assessment must relate error rates to the consequences of error, since the same statistical error imposes entirely different social costs in different identity regimes. Technical precision and institutional justice cannot be unrelated evaluative dimensions. In identity cards, borders, or welfare systems, biometric failure is not merely a user-experience issue: it can affect movement, access to resources, and the ability to prove legal status. Technical performance must therefore be linked to institutional consequences: the same misidentification rate has entirely different political weight in entertainment applications and compulsory identity systems.]

  11. Mejias, Ulises A., and Nick Couldry. Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back. University of Chicago Press, 2024. (Read: Introduction; chapters on data territories, colonialism, and resistance).

    [Note: This book continues and updates the authors' data colonialism argument, placing the ongoing datafication of everyday life and large technology firms' infrastructure expansion within colonial relations' long history. Compared with 2019's The Costs of Connection, it more explicitly addresses contemporary Big Tech and resistance strategies. It therefore works as subsequent debate within the same session rather than assigning two books the same function in separate sessions. Focus on colonial analogy's analytical gains and historical limits. Being seen and being datafied are distinct. Mejias's Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back turns those gains and nonnegotiable limits from a rhetorical proposition into institutional analysis. Data Grab continues the data colonialism framework but concentrates on Big Tech's conversion of connectivity, convenience, and infrastructure into continuing data appropriation. Its policy significance is shifting the problem from individual privacy choices to collective data relations: when leaving major platforms means losing work, social, or public-service opportunities, consent can hardly bear the entire burden of legitimacy. Resistance must therefore involve institutional restrictions and public alternatives. Mejias and Couldry further stress that the data grab does not depend on one-off coercive appropriation: it continues once connectivity becomes a condition of life. The harder platforms become to leave, the easier extraction becomes to package as a natural condition of service exchange. The institutional question then becomes whether data minimization, collective rights, and public infrastructure can make social participation cease to require unlimited surrender of data.]

  12. Taylor, Linnet. "What Is Data Justice? The Case for Connecting Digital Rights and Freedoms Globally" Big Data & Society 4, no. 2 (2017). (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Taylor proposes data justice to connect privacy and data protection with wider social justice. It helps shift critique into normative questions: if datafication produces inequalities of visibility, representation, resource allocation, and agency, institutional evaluation cannot focus solely on individual consent. It can close this session by converting diagnoses of surveillance and coloniality into an agenda on rights, capabilities, and global inequality. Data justice extends digital rights beyond individual privacy to structural distribution. Who accesses data, who can refuse datafication, who bears automated errors, and who benefits from the data economy cannot be resolved by consent alone. Taylor connects governance with social justice while preserving institutional differences for cross-national comparison. Locating data justice within global digital rights avoids universalizing European and North American privacy-law experiences. Countries connect infrastructure differently to social protection, identity regimes, and development policy, giving digital rights different urgencies. Transnational justice must address both individual freedom and resource allocation rather than replicate one legal paradigm. Data justice's unit of analysis is therefore not merely an individual data subject, but data relations constituted by states, platforms, communities, and infrastructure. It also connects usually separate policy domains: privacy concerns control over data, antidiscrimination concerns classification's consequences, and development justice concerns the distribution of infrastructure and capabilities. Taylor brings these into one normative space and reminds us not to assume an individual consumer with ample choices as the default subject of digital rights.]

Session 4: Planetary Computation and Infrastructure Space

This session returns the "cloud" to land, energy, chips, data centers, submarine cables, satellites, spectrum, cities, and legal arrangements. Bratton's The Stack describes planetary computation as a layered architecture; Easterling's Extrastatecraft analyzes how infrastructure space produces quasi-governing effects through standards, logistics, and spatial formats. Star reminds us that infrastructure usually recedes into the background when working smoothly and reappears through breakdown, conflict, or exclusion. Platform power therefore resides not just in interfaces, algorithms, and business models, but in conditions of connection, material resources, and maintenance systems.

Infrastructuralization also changes the relation between authority and territory. Sassen's reassemblage of territory, authority, and rights, Graham and Marvin's differentiated urban networks, and Plantin and colleagues' encounter between platform and infrastructure studies all show the increasingly unstable boundary between platforms and infrastructures. Through APIs, cloud services, identity systems, and payment interfaces, some platforms become underlying conditions other organizations cannot easily bypass. Traditional infrastructures, meanwhile, increasingly adopt platform logics of datafication, service provision, and tiered access. The political question is not whether platforms simply replace states, but how different authorities are redistributed through networks spanning multiple scales.

Varoufakis and Durand's technofeudalism theses become testable only against this infrastructural background. Whether cloud capital, intangible assets, platform gateways, rents, and exit barriers constitute dependencies distinct from traditional capital-labor relations requires point-by-point comparison with platform capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and rent theory. Critics such as Morozov are important precisely because they force the concept to specify its additional explanatory value. If "feudalism" merely renames monopoly, rent, and market power, its theoretical necessity is limited. If platform control of infrastructural conditions genuinely changes market entry, ownership, and dependence, the institutional levels at which this change occurs must be specified.

Required Readings:

  1. Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. 10th anniversary ed., with a new preface by the author. MIT Press, 2026. Originally published 2016. (Read: new preface; "The Nomos of the Cloud"; "Platform and Stack, Model and Machine"; "Cloud Layer").

    [Note: Bratton's stack is not simply a theory of the cloud-computing state. "Nomos of the Cloud" examines planetary computation's challenge to political geography; "Platform and Stack" explains how computational architecture becomes a political model; "Cloud Layer" situates data centers, platforms, infrastructure, and state governance in one architecture. Rather than directly calling Google or Amazon states, closely examine how sovereignty is distributed across layers and organizations. Use MIT Press's 2026 tenth-anniversary edition: revisit the original architectural account of planetary-scale computation, then use the new preface to test its validity and blind spots a decade later. The six-layer model is illuminating not because reality neatly divides into Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User, but because it traces relations across layers: how energy and minerals support the cloud, how addressing brings objects into a computable order, how interfaces present institutional rules as actionable choices, and how a user may be a person, organization, sensor, or machine agent. It is a model of models, not an empirical map. The 2026 edition invites the question of which changes in sovereignty, cloud platforms, AI agents, and geopolitics strengthen the stack and which require revising its hierarchical imagination. The Stack offers a cross-scalar architectural language: its six layers are not merely technical but analytical slices of computation's reorganization of territory, identity, and sovereignty. Its advantage is placing data centers, cities, and interfaces within a single planetary system; its risk is that architectural abstraction obscures regional differences. Use it as a comparative framework rather than a complete world map.]

  2. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Verso, 2014. (Read: Chapter 2, "Zone: The Infrastructure Commons," pp. 25–70).

    [Note: Easterling is not simply saying special zones are lawless spaces. She examines how infrastructure space, through spatial products, protocols, standards, logistics, and institutional arrangements, generates governing effects beyond traditional state planning. Applied to digital platforms, the analogy needs limits: Amazon's cloud and a free-trade zone are different spaces, although both show rules operating through infrastructure and standards rather than conventional legal texts. Calling platforms states, empires, or territories requires care. Free-trade zones and clouds are comparable only at the level of infrastructural regulation; their legal status, spatial structures, and economic relations must be treated separately. Infrastructure space is political precisely because it organizes conduct through technical specifications, spatial templates, and operational standards rather than always through explicit legal commands. Zones, logistics networks, and data centers are not vacuums outside the state; state policy, private capital, and transnational standards often produce them together. Easterling supplies a spatial language for analyzing quasi-governing effects. More importantly, infrastructure space frequently works through replication. Packaged as a standardized spatial product, a zone, industrial park, or logistics model spreads between regions carrying predetermined governing logics. APIs, cloud architectures, and service terms share this replicability, but their spatial and legal mechanisms differ. Comparison should remain at the level of rules spreading with infrastructure. This spatial politics shows how infrastructural power acts through default environments: once rules are embedded in spaces and systems, they are harder to identify than explicit commands. The core is not being outside law but how rules gain lasting force in spatial, standardized, and operational forms.]

  3. Star, Susan Leigh. "The Ethnography of Infrastructure" American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–391.

    [Note: Star provides this session's indispensable methodological foundation. Infrastructure is hard to see because it becomes work and life's background; breakdown, conflict, or exclusion suddenly makes it visible. Studying clouds therefore requires investigating electricity, networks, server rooms, maintenance labor, and standards, not just interfaces and software. If existing theories of capitalism adequately explain rents, network effects, and monopoly, "feudal" is rhetoric; if there are new dependencies, gateway controls, and nonmarket allocations, explain why they require a new concept of social formation. In Star's "The Ethnography of Infrastructure," the political-economic distinctions among rent, profit, gateway control, and exit costs thus exceed conceptual questions. Star also places maintenance, repair, and exceptional experiences at the center. For most users, stable infrastructure recedes into the background; for maintainers, excluded people, and users encountering failures, it remains visible. Social differences are often clearest in disconnection, service suspension, incompatibility, or denied permissions. Infrastructure's relationality also means one system does not become background identically for all. Stable broadband may be invisible to urban middle classes but remain an explicit constraint for remote communities, disabled users, or maintenance workers. Star's ethnography inherently attends to difference: whose infrastructure is it? The maintenance perspective also changes innovation narratives. Reliability often depends on long-term, repetitive, low-visibility repair work rather than original design alone. Failure logs and maintenance sites often reveal actual power relations better than promotional materials.]

  4. Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards, and Christian Sandvig. "Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook" New Media & Society 20, no. 1 (2018): 293–310.

    [Note: This article almost serves as the session's methodological manifesto: platforms and infrastructures can no longer be fully separated, since platforms acquire infrastructural properties while platform logics reorganize traditional infrastructures. It connects Star with Bratton and makes the cloud a form of social organization rather than merely a technical layer. Planetary-scale concepts can make particular places disappear. Macro models explain only when grounded in nodes—minerals, chips, data centers, cables, cities, labor, or jurisdictions—and when they test whether regions bear symmetrical costs. In the session's context, Plantin's "Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook" gives the tension between planetary models and particular places, labor, and maintenance a concrete structure. The infrastructuralization of platforms and platformization of infrastructures captures Google's and Facebook's movement from optional services to nodes of social dependence. Once platforms become infrastructural, stability, universal access, and public responsibility become pressing; traditional infrastructures adopting platform logics may become datafied, commercialized, and organized through interfaces. Both changes blur public utilities and private platforms. This two-way transformation also rewrites public responsibility. Infrastructure is expected to be stable, universal, and available over the long term, while platform firms quickly change services, prices, and rules. When private platforms become unavoidable nodes for education, work, or public communication, corporate flexibility comes into conflict with infrastructural responsibility to society.]

Recommended Readings:

  1. Sassen, Saskia. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton University Press, 2006. (Read: Chapter 7, "Digital Networks, Global Cities," pp. 323–377).

    [Note: Sassen's importance is that globalization does not simply make state sovereignty disappear: territory, authority, and rights are reassembled in transnational networks. This gives a more precise framework than the "platform state": different authorities coexist and overlap at particular spatial nodes. Digital infrastructure is therefore not naturally supranational space, but a site recombining old and new governing scales. Global assemblages undermine narratives of state withdrawal. Global digital networks need legal recognition, urban nodes, financial institutions, and cross-border rules; they can weaken some state capacities while reorganizing and strengthening others. Authority is reassembled across scales rather than simply transferred from states to platforms. Sassen also shows deterritorialization and reterritorialization often occurring together. Data flows seem to escape place, yet server siting, taxation, jurisdiction, and talent concentration anchor them anew in particular cities and countries. Global networks do not abolish space but reorder spatial relations across scales. Digital globalization thus recombines territory, authority, and rights within infrastructural networks rather than abolishing territory. Transnational digital networks always entail renewed concentration at nodes and competition among jurisdictions. The global is produced through particular places. Reorganizing authority also means firms and states are not in a zero-sum relation. States shape clouds through taxation, localization, and security policies; platforms use cross-border architectures to alter regulatory costs. Sassen's assemblage perspective analyzes this coproduction rather than reducing reality to who replaces whom.]

  2. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism. Routledge, 2001. (Read: Chapter 1, pp. 1–36).

    [Note: Differentiated urban infrastructure provision shows how networks produce spatial divisions. Alongside Easterling, it demonstrates that infrastructure need not produce publicness: prices, priorities, connections, and spatial choices can instead create service tiers. Calling platforms states, empires, or territories requires care. Splintering urbanism reveals that infrastructure has no inherently universalist direction. Networked services tier connectivity through prices, standards, and spatial investment, delivering speed, redundancy, and stability to high-value districts while peripheral areas suffer interruption and shortage. For digital infrastructure, this reveals connectivity itself as a new social difference. Fragmentation concerns not only access versus nonaccess, but connection quality, latency, bandwidth, reliability, and affordability. As infrastructure becomes a condition of work, education, and public services, technical differences become differences of opportunity. Infrastructure politics must exceed a single penetration-rate metric. Tiered connection quality eventually settles into tiered educational, employment, and participatory opportunities, making infrastructural equity explicitly distributive. Research must therefore examine service quality and spatial differences rather than merely count connections. Infrastructure differences ultimately become social opportunity differences. The distribution of quality connections, redundancy, and maintenance resources often reveals class and regional divisions in digital cities better than nominal access rates. Network equity must enter design and investment decisions. Splintering Urbanism also shows commercialization replacing universal-service logics with profitability. High-value users and areas gain priority investment; low-return spaces remain undermaintained. Digital networks relying wholly on similar commercial choices may further entrench existing urban class and regional divisions.]

  3. Mattern, Shannon. Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on urban information infrastructures).

    [Note: Mattern extends urban media history across writing, maps, architecture, logistics, databases, and sensing systems, refusing to treat the smart city as a suddenly arriving digital revolution. Her key method juxtaposes code and clay, data and dirt: information infrastructures always depend on material carriers, spatial institutions, and maintenance labor. This provides Bratton's macro stack with a more historical, urban-scale correction. Through Mattern's Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, the political-economic distinctions among rent, profit, gateway control, and exit costs enter organizational and institutional analysis. Mattern treats cities as media environments long constituted by writing, sound, masonry, maps, sensors, and databases, resisting smart-city accounts of digitization as sudden revolution. Urban computation must rest on existing roads, utility networks, administrative archives, and social memory. Digital infrastructure is therefore not an invisible network covering old cities, but something continually layered over and rubbing against historical material strata. Her long urban media history also resists data-city narratives that dismiss older infrastructure as obsolete background. Sensors depend on roads, databases inherit archival categories, and interfaces are constrained by architectural and administrative boundaries. Digitization is never a blank-slate redesign: it continually layers with existing materials, institutions, and histories. This perspective substantially reduces the sense of technological rupture in smart-city discourse. Mattern also expands media from screens to the city itself. Street signs, archives, building materials, and sensors jointly organize information; the smart city is another layer of this long history of mediation, not the first time the city becomes computable.]

  4. Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. MIT Press, 2015. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on cloud infrastructure, sovereignty, and labor).

    [Note: Through the cloud's prehistory, Hu dismantles language that imagines networks as placeless, frictionless space. Connecting clouds with earlier networks, military systems, mainframes, data centers, and labor relations, he shows the cloud as historically formed infrastructure and political imagination, not a natural technical layer. Alongside Bratton, compare architectural modeling and media archaeology as approaches to the same object. Planetary concepts can erase particular places. The tension between planetary models and specific sites, labor, and maintenance revealed by Hu's A Prehistory of the Cloud exceeds internal conceptual debate; it remains testable through empirical evidence and competing explanations beyond Hu's A Prehistory of the Cloud. Hu's A Prehistory of the Cloud confines that tension to particular objects and causal chains; analogies beyond this scope require new evidence, not terminology alone. Tracing the cloud metaphor's prehistory reveals how placelessness, weightlessness, and unlimited expansion obscure military, network, and data-center foundations. The cloud's virtuality is an interface effect, not a material fact. Concentrated data centers, dispersed terminals, and hierarchical network routes show that clouds create spatial abstractions while reorganizing concrete geographical dependencies. The metaphor also has political-psychological effects: users more readily understand storage and computation as natural environments rather than corporate infrastructure built and sold as services. Services seem as ubiquitous as air while depending on a few hyperscale operators. Hu's historicization exposes this naturalization as a cultural product of the technology industry.]

  5. Parks, Lisa. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Duke University Press, 2005. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on satellite infrastructures and global visibility).

    [Note: Parks extends media infrastructure into orbital space, examining how satellites connect ground, signals, images, and geopolitics. For planetary computation, this reminds us that "planetary" is not a rhetorical "global," but a vertical space composed of orbits, spectrum, ground stations, state licenses, and investment. Clouds also need locating in these material layers. At the scale of Parks's Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, the connection of clouds, platforms, and infrastructure with land, energy, standards, and sovereignty appears first as concrete relations. Technofeudalism must be compared with monopoly, rent, and platform capitalism. If "feudal" only renames market power, its explanatory gain is limited; if infrastructural control changes dependence, entry, and returns, identify the institutional levels involved. Satellite media bring infrastructure's vertical dimension into digital politics. Orbital positions, ground stations, spectrum allocation, and remote sensing jointly constitute communication conditions, so global coverage always depends on specific geopolitical arrangements. Parks turns planetary scale from macro rhetoric into traceable technical objects and resource competition. From satellite television to satellite internet, orbital infrastructure shows communication sovereignty's vertical space. State borders cannot fully explain signal coverage, yet launch capabilities, spectrum coordination, and ground reception remain institutionally controlled. Planetary computation's globality is concretely produced through scarce positions, technical licenses, and capital investment. Satellite networks thus show that global coverage does not abolish boundaries; boundaries extend from the ground into institutional arrangements for orbits, spectrum, and ground stations.]

  6. Lehdonvirta, Vili. Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control. MIT Press, 2022. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on platform governance and institutional power).

    [Note: Lehdonvirta compares large platforms as institutions capable of rulemaking, enforcement, and dispute resolution, asking why they assume some traditional governing functions in cross-border digital markets. "Overtaking the state" in the title is a proposition to test, not a factual description. Its value is distinguishing state sovereignty, private governance, market infrastructure, and user dependence rather than declaring platforms already to be states. Lehdonvirta's Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control, Parks's Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, and Varoufakis's Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism place the two-way infrastructuralization of platforms and platformization of infrastructures in different intellectual traditions. Calling platforms states, empires, or territories requires care. Lehdonvirta's Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control frees this two-way process from overly abstract epochal judgments. Technofeudalism must be compared with monopoly, rent, and platform capitalism. If feudalism only renames market power, its explanatory gain is limited; if infrastructure control changes dependence, entry, and returns, identify the institutional levels involved. Describing platforms as empire-like governing structures concerns their powers of rulemaking, dispute resolution, identity management, and sanction, not a rhetorical analogy with states. Platform authority, unlike traditional states, derives from contracts and infrastructure dependence; it may reach across borders without territorial sovereignty. The comparison is most valuable in clarifying the sources and limits of different governing capacities.]

  7. Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, 2023. (Read: Chapter 3, "Cloud Capital," pp. 58–91; Chapter 4, "The Rise of the Cloudalists and the Demise of Profit," pp. 92–115; Chapter 7, "Escape from Technofeudalism," pp. 175–214).

    [Note: Varoufakis's central claim is that cloud capital changes the traditional relation of competition and profit, producing new dependencies through platform gateways, data, and cloud infrastructure. The useful question is not whether to accept the word technofeudalism, but whether it explains rents, network effects, monopoly, and user dependence. If monopoly capital and platform capitalism still explain them, what does feudalism add? Conversely, does it reveal power relations difficult to explain with traditional capital theory? Distinguish cloud capital from ordinary digital capital. The argument is not that large tech firms are feudal because they are large: platforms accumulate infrastructure that shapes behavior, organizes transactions, and extracts cloud rent from ecosystem participants, increasingly arranging markets inside private platforms. Read Chapters 3 and 4 together: the former defines cloud capital, the latter introduces cloudalists and changes in profit/rent relations. Chapter 7 shows the account must confront exit and political reorganization, not merely diagnose an era. Test whether Amazon Marketplace, app stores, and cloud services share this structure. The cloud-capital thesis argues platforms are no longer just firms in capitalist markets: cloud infrastructure and user behavior let them shape transaction environments and extract cloud rent from dependency. The crucial dispute is not whether "feudal" is striking, but whether relations among profit, rent, markets, and platform power have structurally changed. If conventional monopoly theory already explains these returns, technofeudalism's additional explanatory power must be demonstrated explicitly.]

  8. Durand, Cédric. How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy. Translated by David Broder. Verso, 2024. Originally published as Technoféodalisme: Critique de l'économie numérique in 2020. (Read: Chapter 2, "On Digital Domination"; Chapter 3, "The Rentier Class of the Intangible"; Chapter 4, "The "Techno-Feudal" Hypothesis").

    [Note: Durand's structure particularly suits comparison with Varoufakis: Chapter 2 covers digital domination, Chapter 3 intangible assets and the rentier class, and only Chapter 4 systematically proposes the technofeudal hypothesis. Distinguish three levels: mechanisms of domination, forms of accumulation, and a hypothesis about social formation. Compare Marxist rent theory, monopoly capitalism, and platform capitalism rather than equating rent with feudal ground rent. Similar vocabulary conceals different paths: Durand emphasizes how digital domination, intangible assets, intellectual property, and rentier logics reorganize accumulation, placing technofeudalism at the boundary between capitalism's internal development and potential transformation of social form. Because Chapters 2–4 progress cumulatively, do not jump to the feudal hypothesis. Establish domination and intangible rent first, then ask whether these mechanisms warrant naming a social formation. Reading the books together is not a contest but a comparison of their criteria for feudalism. Durand's How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy, Varoufakis's Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, and Thorhauge's The Economic Lives of Platforms: Rethinking the Political Economy of Digital Markets bring the scalar tension between planetary models and particular places, labor, and maintenance down from macro judgment to mechanisms. Planetary concepts can erase particular places. Durand's argument is best separated into three questions rather than accepted as an epochal name: how domination forms, how intangibles generate rents, and whether these changes amount to a new social formation. Feudalism then becomes a testable political-economic hypothesis, not a predetermined conclusion. Platform dependency, intellectual property, and monopoly rent must be analyzed separately.]

  9. Thorhauge, Anne Mette, Andreas Lindegaard Gregersen, Eva Iris Otto, Jacob Ørmen, and Morten Axel Pedersen, eds. The Economic Lives of Platforms: Rethinking the Political Economy of Digital Markets. Bristol University Press, 2024. (Read: "Rethinking the Political Economy of Digital Markets," pp. 1–16; "Modes of Connectivity," pp. 17–36).

    [Note: This collection provides finer-grained comparisons for the technofeudalism debate. Rather than begin with an overarching social formation, it examines how connectivity, market design, data, and mediation organize economic activity. After Varoufakis and Durand, it forces large terms such as cloud landlord and rent into researchable mechanisms: which gateways are controlled, how prices are set, how supply and demand are organized, and where exit costs actually occur. Platforms' economic lives exceed market intermediation. Connections, pricing, data accumulation, and rulemaking jointly determine value's creation and distribution, with significant differences across platform types. The collection moves political economy from a single business model to comparative analysis, preventing a few giant firms from standing for the whole platform economy. Connectivity modes also determine transaction entry, participants' statuses, and which relations become datafied. An economics confined to prices and network effects misses connections' institutional nature. Treating connection as designed relations reveals how market structures are written into technical interfaces. Platform political economy must study how interfaces institutionalize economic relations, not only seek power in financial statements or market shares. Connections themselves constitute institutional design, not just a precondition for transactions. This is an important distinction from ordinary market intermediaries. Defining eligibility, transaction units, and visible information already preorganizes market relations in interfaces. Platform power thus operates before market formation.]

  10. Mezzadra, Sandro, Niccolò Cuppini, Mattia Frapporti, and Maurilio Pirone, eds. Capitalism in the Platform Age: Emerging Assemblages of Labour and Welfare in Urban Spaces. Springer, 2024. (Read: "Introduction. The Platform Age," pp. 3–14; "Operations of Platforms," pp. 15–31; "The Politics of Platforms," pp. 81–95).

    [Note: This open-access collection advances from classic digital-labor theory to recent platform-labor research. It treats platforms as infrastructures organizing labor, urban space, welfare, and social cooperation, bringing valorization, algorithmic management, worker subjectivity, and alternatives into one framework. Alongside Scholz and Woodcock, ask whether platform cooperativism changes only ownership or also labor organization and social reproduction more broadly. Calling platforms states, empires, or territories requires care. Data centers, cities, borders, supply chains, and maintenance sites show how macro architectures are executed and whether environmental and labor costs are symmetrical across regions. Capitalism in the Platform Age moves platform studies into the intersection of cities, welfare, and labor reproduction. Platforms are not isolated apps: they may reorganize transport, delivery, care, and public services, jointly platformizing labor markets and urban space. Analysis must therefore track the rewriting of local institutions and redistribution of social-reproductive costs, not only firm valuations or extraction. The urban dimension shows platforms and local states do not simply replace each other. Delivery, ride-hailing, short-term rentals, and care platforms must encounter transport rules, housing policy, labor law, and welfare institutions. Expansion exploits local institutional differences while prompting local governments to redefine regulatory objects. Welfare effects particularly matter. As work splits into temporary tasks and multiplatform income, insurance, taxation, and protections founded on stable employment become harder to apply. Platform capitalism not only innovates corporate organization; it forces welfare states to redefine labor statuses and social rights. Cities are the institutional scale where this conflict first becomes visible.]

  11. Morozov, Evgeny. "Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason" New Left Review, nos. 133/134 (2022). (Read: entire essay).

    [Note: Morozov supplies a particularly useful opposition within this session. He questions the hasty treatment of digital monopoly, intellectual property, platform rents, and financialization as evidence that capitalism has yielded to feudalism, asking us to reconsider the continuing roles of competition, profit, and state policy. This prevents the two technofeudalism books from dictating the debate and makes their concept a falsifiable, comparable hypothesis. "Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason" transforms the political-economic differences among rent, profit, gateway control, and exit costs from rhetoric into institutional analysis. These differences do not lead to one conclusion; they require comparing configurations of power across organizational settings to determine explanatory scope and failure conditions. Morozov's critique offers a necessary counterargument: prematurely announcing contemporary capitalism as feudalism may obscure the continuing mechanisms of capital, competition, finance, and the state. Conceptual novelty cannot replace evidence for historical periodization. Productive debate compares theories' precision in explaining the same phenomena—platform rents, monopoly, infrastructural dependence. Morozov also reminds us that historical analogies shape strategy. Treating platforms as feudal lordships may favor restoring capitalist competition; treating the problem as capital concentration and privately owned infrastructure yields different priorities for antitrust, public ownership, and labor politics. Concept choice is therefore not a naming game: it organizes policy imagination.]

  12. Mosco, Vincent. To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World. Paradigm Publishers, 2014. (Read: Introduction; chapters on cloud computing, big data, and political economy).

    [Note: From political economy and communication studies, Mosco demystifies the cloud's industry structure, labor, data, and ideology. Predating stack and technofeudalism accounts, it provides a historical marker: from the outset, cloud computing involved corporate concentration, data centers, energy, labor, and state policy, not merely technical outsourcing. Planetary concepts can erase particular places. Preserve falsifiability rather than maximize conceptual coverage; extend a framework only where evidence supports its central mechanisms. The tension between planetary models and specific places, labor, and maintenance thus remains testable through evidence and competing explanations beyond Mosco's To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World. Demystification means showing that clouds do not eliminate place: language hides servers, data centers, electricity, and labor from users' experience. Ideological effects and material architecture require simultaneous study. The more weightless and ubiquitous a service appears, the more its fixed investments in land, energy, and capital need tracing. Cloud concentration also has economies of scale. Capital, energy purchasing, and technical operations give large data centers cost advantages, so on-demand convenience and highly concentrated backends grow together. Demystification therefore concerns industrial structure as well as language: the more clouds resemble ubiquitous public environments, the easier their ownership becomes to obscure. Mosco also returns clouds to global communication politics. Concentrated data centers and services give a few firms cross-sector infrastructural positions, turning traditional media, governments, and ordinary businesses into clients. Clouds create infrastructural dependence; the political issues concern control over outages, pricing, and standards as well as privacy.]

Part III: Mediation, Organization and Labour (Weeks 5–6)

Session 5: Recursive Publics, Mediation and Digital Politics

This session shifts from control and extraction to the institutional conditions of publicness. Kelty's recursive public is not a crowd discussing things online, but a public form able to participate in maintaining, modifying, and reproducing its own technical and institutional foundations. Free-software communities matter theoretically not only because their code is open, but because licenses, collaborative norms, discussion procedures, version control, and infrastructure jointly constitute a recursively modifiable public life. Warner's analysis of publics and counterpublics emphasizes that publics are not fixed, preexisting groups: circulation, responses, and recirculation continually call them into being. Fraser further places unequal participation and counterpublics within public-sphere theory.

Kornbluh's Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism gives this discussion a tension at the level of media form. Immediacy, transparency, immersion, and the absence of mediation are often treated as digital culture's natural values. Political organization, however, depends on procedures, representation, delay, explanation, memory, and chains of responsibility. Tufekci, Dean, Gerbaudo, and others further show that inexpensive mobilization and rapid circulation do not automatically produce sustained organizational capacity. Connections quickly enlarge participation, yet may also make decision-making, resource accumulation, and long-term coordination fragile.

Digital politics therefore turns not on an abstract choice between centralization and decentralization, but on which mediations participants can understand, hold accountable, and modify. A public's owning its servers is not the sole criterion; more important is its ability to influence rulemaking, resource allocation, structures of visibility, and dispute resolution. Only when both media conditions and organizational forms can become political questions does publicness avoid shrinking into a temporary attention space supplied by a platform. Recursive publics thus connect media technology, institutional design, and collective autonomy.

Required Readings:

  1. Kelty, Christopher M. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Duke University Press, 2008. (Read: Chapter 1, "A Recursive Public," pp. 27–63).

    [Note: This is the session's central text. Kelty's recursive public not only uses public media but can modify, maintain, and reproduce their infrastructural and institutional conditions. Focus on how software licenses, code, discussion, maintenance, and identity jointly form publicness. In comparison with the platform era, ask what remains of publicness when participants lose practical control over code, servers, accounts, and rules. Conversely, does enduring publicness require some autonomy over technical infrastructure? Participant counts and circulation speed cannot directly measure it. A highly visible group may still lack the ability to preserve archives, modify rules, own infrastructure, or determine exit conditions; distinguish these institutional dimensions from expression rights. Kelty's Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software grounds publics' ability to maintain and modify media conditions in institutional relations. Publicness is not synonymous with information traffic: it requires durable rules, memory, procedures, and media conditions. Platforms expand visibility but may place the interfaces, data, and communicative structures supporting publics under private governance. A recursive public is no ordinary online discussion group; it can reshape its own conditions of communication and collaboration. Free-software communities are recursive because members not only use code and licenses but maintain these institutional-technical foundations. This raises a sharp platform-era problem: how is organizational autonomy constrained when publics can form only on unmodifiable proprietary platforms? Recursion also means a public can in some sense repair itself. When software, licenses, or communication channels fail, members can change them through shared rules rather than wait for an outside platform's decision. Technical and democratic autonomy do not entirely coincide for Kelty, yet the right to maintain makes a crucial connection between them.]

  2. Kornbluh, Anna. Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Verso, 2024. (Read: "Circulation," pp. 24–43; "Writing," pp. 65–112; "Antitheory," pp. 148–190).

    [Note: Kornbluh's book is not directly about technology; it belongs here precisely to broaden the question of why platform-era publicness increasingly seeks directness, instantaneity, immersion, and no mediation. She calls this cultural form immediacy and argues that it lowers tolerance for representation, distance, and mediation. This creates a tension for recursive publics: rules, procedures, discussion, and maintenance sustain publicness, yet immediacy culture experiences these mediations as obstacles. What happens to organization's necessary delays, explanations, and institutional procedures when political communication demands immediate reaction? Read "Circulation," "Writing," and "Antitheory" together. Immediacy is not one media phenomenon, but a late-capitalist style linking circulation, first-person expression, immersion, transparency, and antitheoretical attitudes. Her polemical intensity also requires critique: does reducing mediation always mean political regression? When marginalized subjects seek to speak directly, how should we discuss representation's institutional value? Positioning Kornbluh among Warner, Fraser, and Kelty avoids one-sided praise of mediation; distinguish necessary, accountable, and monopolistic mediations. Mediation is not inherently antidemocratic: can it be visible, accountable, and reconfigured? Critiquing immediacy connects cultural form with political organization. When directness, immersion, the first person, and instantaneous circulation become values, mediation looks like alienation or delay. Yet public politics depends on irreducible mediations of representation, procedure, explanation, and organization. Digital speed thus has two sides: it extends responsiveness while potentially eroding the distance and time required for sustained judgment.]

  3. Warner, Michael. "Publics and Counterpublics" Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90.

    [Note: Warner emphasizes that a public is not a fixed group existing before media: circulation, response, and recirculation continually summon it. This particularly matters for platforms, where recommendations, reposting, group chats, subscriptions, and algorithmic timelines alter public formation. Read with Kelty to examine how technical conditions produce publicness. Inexpensive mobilization and organizational capacity are distinct measures. Rapid assembly amplifies issues without necessarily accumulating trust, resources, divided roles, or conflict-resolution mechanisms; keep mobilization, organization, and institution distinct. "Publics and Counterpublics" offers a limited but effective scale for explaining differences among publics, counterpublics, networked publics, and recursive publics. It identifies mechanisms without replacing further analysis of organizations, law, and material conditions. Publics arise through texts' circulation and strangers' sustained responses rather than preexist them. Publicness is thus media-dependent: communicative rhythms, forms of address, and accessibility change who constitutes a public. Algorithmic timelines further intervene, so platform rankings and recommendations shape formation alongside participants' communicative acts. Counterpublics also organize themselves through expression and social rhythms different from the mainstream. Platforms lower their communicative costs while measuring all expression through standardized formats and metrics. This tension between standardization and counterpublic difference is essential to networked publicness.]

  4. Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy" Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 56–80.

    [Note: Fraser revises classical public-sphere theory through subaltern counterpublics, participatory parity, and identity differences. Rather than make a unified sphere the only ideal, she asks how multiple publics, counterpublics, and marginal publics coexist. In this session, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy" gives a concrete structure to the distinction among expression, infrastructural ownership, and democratic governance. Publicness is not information traffic: it requires durable rules, memory, procedures, and media conditions. Platforms expand visibility but may privately govern the interfaces, data, and circulation structures that sustain publics. Counterpublics also revise the normative image of one shared public sphere. Social inequality means resources, languages, and visibility for discussion have never been equal; marginalized groups often first need their own counterpublic spaces. Digital networks expand differentiation while platform ranking and commercial logics shape encounters among publics. Participatory parity further shows that formal openness does not guarantee equal participation. Resources, status, and expressive habits affect who is heard. Platforms lower speaking thresholds yet create new inequalities through attention competition. Multiple publics must therefore be studied alongside actual differences in participation conditions. Counterpublics' value is preserving difference within publicness rather than requiring everyone first to adopt one language and expressive norm.]

Recommended Readings:

  1. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. International Publishers, 1971. Originally published in Italian selections from the prison notebooks, 1948–1951. (Read: "The Intellectuals," pp. 5–23).

    [Note: This reading does not simply rename programmers organic intellectuals; it reconsiders the links among knowledge, production, and organization. Gramsci examines intellectuals' emergence from particular social forces and their roles in culture, organization, and hegemony. In digital environments, examine separately the knowledge positions of software engineers, protocol developers, platform managers, data workers, and researchers. Technical competence does not naturally represent a political class. Participant counts and circulation speed cannot directly measure publicness. Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks moves publics' capacity to maintain and modify media conditions from macro judgment to mechanism analysis; validity ultimately depends on identifying institutional relations empirically. Organic intellectuals connect intellectual labor with social groups and organized practice rather than give clever people special status. In digital society, the concept examines engineers, researchers, technical communities, and labor organizations forming shared worldviews and organizational capacities. Expertise itself does not determine political alignment: how knowledge is organized, which social forces it serves, and how it becomes collective practice are decisive. Distinguish technical authority from political representation too. Knowing a system does not automatically entitle engineers to define other groups' public interests. Expertise becomes collective political capacity through organization, negotiation, and shared practice. This particularly matters for AI expert governance. Gramsci also emphasizes reciprocity: intellectuals organize social experience, while organizations give knowledge work sustained social positions. Publicness dependent solely on short-cycle opinion leaders struggles to develop this long-term function. How engineering communities, labor organizations, and public research institutions accumulate knowledge and transmit organizational memory is the real core of the "new organic intellectuals" question.]

  2. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Translated by Thomas Burger. MIT Press, 1991. Originally published 1962. (Read: Part V, pp. 141–180).

    [Note: This supplies public-sphere theory's historical baseline. The point is not to equate platforms with Habermas's mass media, but to understand the institutional, medial, and social conditions a public sphere requires and how commercialization changes them. Mediation is not inherently antidemocratic; it must be visible, accountable, and reconfigurable. Habermas still offers a key benchmark: publicness depends on institutional spaces, media forms, and social qualifications, not information circulation alone. The platform-era issue exceeds everyone's ability to speak: how business models, ownership, attention allocation, and inequality organize discussion, and which institutions sustain critical communication, matter more. Commercialization takes new infrastructural forms digitally. Traditional mass media shape discussion through ownership and advertising; platforms additionally control identity, ranking, circulation, and feedback. Theory must extend from content production to distribution architectures and private technical systems' specification of communicative conditions. Who controls infrastructure becomes unavoidable: media ownership and technical architecture require joint discussion. Publicness's material conditions now extend from newspapers, coffeehouses, and broadcasting to servers, interfaces, and recommenders. Media architecture becomes part of public-sphere institutions. Revisiting the sphere means not restoring old media orders, but analyzing how new infrastructures affect equal participation, issue formation, and public judgment. Habermas's normative framework cannot directly encompass fragmented network publics, but still offers measures: are participatory conditions equal, can agendas escape private control, and are reasons open to public contestation? Joined to platform infrastructures, these retain critical force without reviving the historical social model.]

  3. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. Yale University Press, 2006. (Read: Chapter 3, "Peer Production and Sharing," pp. 59–90).

    [Note: Benkler offers an institutional and economic analysis of peer production. With Kelty, ask whether commons-based peer production supplies organizational forms distinct from firms and markets, and how platforms reabsorb their public outputs. Inexpensive mobilization is not organizational capacity. Through Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, differences among publics, counterpublics, networked publics, and recursive publics enter institutional and organizational analysis. Peer production's political potential comes from changing the relation between productive cooperation and exclusive property, not networks themselves. Open licenses, modular collaboration, and shared resources lower participation barriers but still require governing rules, maintenance, and sustainable material foundations. This sharply contrasts with platformization: open collaboration is not free platform labor. Distinguish nonmarket cooperation from unpaid corporate contribution. The former usually has shared rules, common resources, and institutions through which participants influence production; the latter may leave platforms in unilateral control of infrastructure and revenue. Both use networks, but their property and governance structures differ completely. This is crucial for open-source models. Even freely downloadable weights leave a significant institutional distance from commons-based peer production if one company still decides training, governance, and deployment.]

  4. Coleman, Gabriella. Coding Freedom. Princeton University Press, 2012. (Read: Chapter 3, pp. 61–84).

    [Note: Coleman's ethnography brings free software and hacker culture from abstract technological freedom into particular communities. Focus on relations among technical ability, ethics, political identities, and organizational culture. The distinction between expression, infrastructural ownership, and democratic governance revealed by Coleman's Coding Freedom is not merely an internal conceptual debate. It remains subject to empirical evidence and competing explanations beyond Coleman's Coding Freedom. Coleman's Coding Freedom confines this distinction to particular objects and causal chains; analogies beyond that scope need new evidence rather than terminology alone. Coleman's Coding Freedom grounds free-software ethics in community practices: technical competence, humor, legal consciousness, hacker ethics, and organizational boundaries intertwine. Publicness arises not just from open licenses, but from participants' sustained commitments to code, rules, and shared identities. This ethnography particularly matters because free-software politics do not follow automatically from license texts. Humor, craft, reputation, legal consciousness, and everyday collaboration jointly shape community ethics. Technical autonomy is thus a practiced and organized cultural form, not a political property naturally appearing when code is opened. Coleman also shows how technological communities' politics often appear in legal details and everyday norms rather than grand declarations. Specific understandings of copyright, anonymity, free speech, and collaborative obligations shape conduct. Free-software culture is an institutionalized ethics stabilized by long practice, not by members sharing a single ideology.]

  5. Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas. Yale University Press, 2017. (Read: Introduction and Chapters 1–2).

    [Note: Tufekci examines how networked media lower mobilization costs without necessarily strengthening long-term organizational capacity. With Kornbluh, distinguish immediacy's rapid circulation from organization's needs for memory, trust, accumulated resources, and procedures. Participant counts and circulation speed cannot directly measure publicness. At the scale of Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas, publics' ability to maintain and modify media conditions appears first as concrete relations. Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas explains that ability only insofar as corresponding institutional mechanisms are empirically identifiable. Through Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas, the question becomes more rigorous: which mechanisms actually change, which involve only a change of medium, and who bears the consequences? Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas further insists on differences among objects and institutional boundaries; rhetorical force cannot replace empirical explanation. Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas particularly shows that networked movements can gain enormous communicative scale almost instantly without simultaneously developing negotiation, resource management, or internal conflict-resolution capacities. A capacity deficit is not a dismissal of network mobilization, but an account of asymmetry between organizational foundations and communication speed. Networked protests show that digital media dramatically reduce mobilization costs, quickly producing scale and visibility without necessarily developing bargaining, decision-making, and conflict resolution. The experience traditional organizations slowly accumulate may be precisely what rapid mobilization lacks. Network movements' fragility may therefore arise from unequal growth of organizational and communicative capacity rather than failure of communication.]

  6. Dean, Jodi. Crowds and Party. Verso, 2016. (Read: Chapter 3, "The Distributive Party," pp. 119–156).

    [Note: Dean questions the assumption that more connections mean stronger political organization. Networked circulation produces many individualized gatherings without necessarily producing enduring organizations. With Kelty, distinguish recursive publics from network crowds. Dean's Crowds and Party, Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas, and Gerbaudo's Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism place the conflict between immediacy and speed, on one hand, and organization's necessary mediations and delays, on the other, within different intellectual traditions. Mediation is not inherently antidemocratic; the question is whether it can be visible, accountable, and reconstructed. Dean's Crowds and Party frees this conflict from abstract epochal diagnoses. The contribution of Dean's Crowds and Party is to preserve theory's falsifiability. Dean's Crowds and Party does not simply reject crowd mobilization: it stresses the structural difference between momentary assembly and organizational forms capable of decisions, discipline, and sustained action. Digital media magnify the former without automatically producing the latter. This organizational question strips network connection of a naturally democratic aura. Rapid circulation produces shared feelings and short-term gatherings without necessarily creating organizations responsible for decisions, resources, and long-term commitments. The tension between crowd and party becomes crucial to digital activism: political capacity requires durable organizational forms as well as expression.]

  7. Gerbaudo, Paolo. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. Pluto Press, 2012. (Read: Chapter 1, pp. 1–20).

    [Note: Gerbaudo's discussion of leaderless networks analyzes social media's redistribution of political visibility and leadership. It does not prove network movements undemocratic, but suggests interfaces may generate new centers. Low mobilization costs and organizational capacity are different measures. Gerbaudo's Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism separates distinctions among publics, counterpublics, networked publics, and recursive publics into connected elements. His correction to leaderless-network accounts is particularly important. Social media do not eliminate leadership: account visibility, emotional choreography, and calls to action produce new soft leadership. Networks can be formally distributed yet highly concentrated in attention and agenda-setting. Study implicit curation, coordination, and representation rather than judge decentralization from organizational self-descriptions alone. The choreography of assembly reveals organizational labor connecting online circulation and offline gatherings. Who selects places, times, and slogans, and who maintains information flows, shapes supposedly spontaneous movements. Digital media do not abolish organization but make some of its labor less conspicuous as curation, reposting, and emotional mobilization. Soft leadership also illuminates new representational problems. Highly visible accounts can coordinate effectively while acquiring the authority to interpret a movement without formal authorization. Network politics needs new accountability so communicative advantages do not automatically become unquestionable representative authority. Leadership and horizontal participation are questions of organizational design, not mutually exclusive choices.]

  8. Milan, Stefania. Social Movements and Their Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. (Read: Chapter 2, pp. 31–54).

    [Note: This examines movements building their own communication and media infrastructures. Extending recursive publics to political actors reveals a potentially vast difference between owning and using media. Milan's Social Movements and Their Technologies, Gerbaudo's Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism, and Juris's Networking Futures bring the distinction among expression, infrastructure ownership, and democratic governance from macro judgments to mechanisms. Historical analogies are valuable only at that level. Declaring an epochal shift merely because algorithms, platforms, or models have appeared destroys theory's ability to distinguish continuity from rupture. Milan's Social Movements and Their Technologies contributes by returning this broad judgment to identifiable institutions. The distinction consequently remains open to empirical evidence and competing explanations beyond Milan's Social Movements and Their Technologies. Movement technologies concern not just which media to choose but whether relative autonomy over communicative conditions can be built. Independent servers, encrypted communication, independent media, and technical volunteers may constitute movements' own infrastructural capacities. Milan thus turns media use into media governance: an organization's degree of control over technological conditions directly affects action's continuity.]

  9. Juris, Jeffrey S. Networking Futures. Duke University Press, 2008. (Read: Chapter 1, pp. 1–26).

    [Note: Taking movements against globalization as cases, Juris observes networked organization emerging in actual action, avoiding its reduction to a purely technical structure. Participant counts and communication speed cannot directly measure publicness. Juris's Networking Futures clarifies causal layers in publics' ability to maintain and modify media conditions. Juris's Networking Futures explains this ability only where corresponding institutional mechanisms can be identified empirically. Around Juris's Networking Futures, trace connections among mechanisms rather than seek one term covering every phenomenon. The ethnography in Juris's Networking Futures further shows networked organization is no direct projection of technical topology onto political form. Meetings, trust, resources, traditions of action, and interorganizational negotiation sustain networks together; horizontalism always involves coordination and informal leadership. The ethnography of antiglobalization movements shows networking as organizational norms and political culture as well as technical structure. Horizontal deliberation, autonomy, and diversity are practiced through meetings, mailing lists, and action networks, with coordination costs and informal power. Network organizations' democracy is an institutional achievement requiring maintenance, not an automatic property of connected nodes. Juris also shows horizontalism's practical difficulties: informal networks do not eliminate power, since technical skill, resources, language, and ability to travel still generate centers. Organizational analysis must examine both formal structures and informal hierarchies. Horizontalism is better treated as an ongoing practical norm than an accomplished organizational fact.]

  10. Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2015. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on affective publics and networked storytelling).

    [Note: Papacharissi centers affect, emotional expression, and narrative structures in networked publicness. Publics form not only through rational arguments and information exchange: affective rhythms, hashtags, visibility, and circulating stories temporarily organize them too. After Warner and Fraser, this supplements overly institutional or normative tendencies while remaining distinct from Berlant: here the focus is public formation, whereas the next session concerns attachment in precarious lives. Mediation is not inherently antidemocratic; visibility, accountability, and reconstruction are the questions. Affective publics free affect from simple opposition to public reason. Circulating hashtags, images, and narratives assemble dispersed individuals into temporary publics of shared feeling; emotional intensity itself becomes political connection. Can such connection become sustained organization, and how does platforms' optimization of visibility and interaction amplify selected emotions? Affect does not necessarily produce superficial politics. It sustains memory, identity, and common concerns, or may be depleted by short attention cycles. Distinguish formation from institutionalization: the former explains how connections happen, while the latter still requires organizational theory. Endurance ultimately depends on organization, memory, and institutional supports; emotional intensity cannot replace long-term political capacity. Affect's circulation also clearly depends on platforms. Certain emotions travel readily through short texts, visual impact, and engagement metrics, and ranking may further amplify highly engaging content. Affective publics are not spontaneous psychological aggregates: media forms and algorithmic visibility shape them. This infrastructural condition must inform any account of digital political emotion.]

  11. boyd, danah. "Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications" In A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, edited by Zizi Papacharissi, 39–58. Routledge, 2011. (Read: entire chapter).

    [Note: Boyd's networked publics explain how persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability alter public interaction. The point is not that Facebook or Twitter automatically generate democratic public spheres, but to supply middle-range concepts explaining how affordances change speech's temporality, visibility, audience boundaries, and recirculation. Reading with Warner's circulation is especially productive. Low mobilization costs and organizational capacity are different measures. "Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications" turns differences among publics, counterpublics, networked publics, and recursive publics from rhetorical propositions into institutional analysis. The framework emphasizes affordances' shaping of communication: persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability change expression's time, reach, and retrievability. Social networks are thus not simply online traditional public spheres. Preserved visibility, copyable content, and blurred audiences bring identity management, context collapse, and participation together. Networked publics also alter imagined audiences. Speakers often address potential, invisible, algorithmically expandable audiences rather than defined groups, changing self-presentation and risk assessment. Context collapse is not individual failure to manage privacy: multiple social settings are technically compressed into one interface. The social tensions of network publics thus enter interface design.]

  12. Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press, 2018. (Read: Chapter 2, "The Myth of the Neutral Platform," pp. 24–44; Chapter 5, "The Human Labor of Moderation," pp. 111–140).

    [Note: The book analyzes platforms' content governance through policies and technical rules while emphasizing moderation's dependence on extensive hidden human labor. It corrects the image of automatic algorithmic governance: algorithms, rules, human review, and commercial risk management commonly govern together. Content governance thus resembles a quasi-public institution yet lacks public bodies' usual democratic authorization and procedural constraints. Rulemaking, automated detection, and human review jointly determine visibility's boundaries, while firms control both interpretation and infrastructure. Gillespie makes platform responsibility concern governance's legitimacy, not merely deleting or retaining content. Moderation also exposes a private-platform paradox: firms claim neutral intermediation while constantly making public-order-like rules. Scale forces reliance on automation and global human labor, so interpretation becomes a continuous organizational process. Disputes cannot be reduced to a single opposition between free speech and censorship. Moderation is simultaneously content policy, a labor institution, and infrastructural governance; together these determine publicness's actual boundaries. Platforms are private firms and de facto communicative infrastructures, a tension underlying governing disputes. Moderation's scale also creates continual friction between rules and cases. Uniform policies encounter linguistic, cultural, and political differences, while automated detection cannot fully understand context. Platforms constantly adjust between global consistency and local judgment. Research should focus not only on contested individual decisions but on how this vast institution produces executable categories and exceptions. The politics of moderation also appear in handling exceptions. The more complex contexts are compressed into uniform policies, the more borderline judgments are required; these are precisely where platforms exercise de facto public power.]

Session 6: Platform Labour, Precarity and New Class Relations

This session brings the political economy of platforms into the labour process and the time of everyday life. Platforms reorganize employment through task allocation, ratings, dynamic pricing, task decomposition, identity verification and automatic deactivation. The power of the "boss" can thus appear as interfaces, metrics and models, without always being exercised directly by a visible manager. Scholz, Woodcock, Rosenblat and Aloisi/De Stefano approach this from cooperativism, workers' struggles, drivers' experiences and labour law. They show that algorithmic management has not abolished labour relations; information asymmetry and dispersed responsibility may instead make labour control harder to identify.

Terranova's free labor, Casilli's research on microtasks, and Gray and Suri's account of ghost work extend digital labour to user participation, content moderation, data annotation and training support. "Automation" often depends on extensive human labour that is geographically dispersed and erased from its public narrative. AI systems therefore cannot be understood solely through models and computing power. Platformization further transfers work-related risks to individuals: waiting, accepting tasks, maintaining ratings, paying for equipment and remaining continuously available become parts of the labour process. Class relations are consequently expressed not only in wages, but also in information rights, conditions of exit, data ownership and control over time.

Berlant's Cruel Optimism adds an affective and temporal dimension to this structure of experience. Precarious labour persists not simply because of external coercion, but also because visions of "flexibility," "freedom," "entrepreneurship" and "self-realization" can become objects of attachment that sustain people's life narratives. Platform cooperatives, unions, collective bargaining and public infrastructure therefore confront more than ownership: they must also address the distribution of risk, the organization of everyday time, and whether workers can constitute a sustainable collective political subject. Institutional alternatives must reach these levels to move beyond the limited idea of simply changing a platform's owner.

Required Readings:

  1. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011. (Read: Chapter 1, "Cruel Optimism," pp. 23–50; Chapter 6, "After the Good Life, an Impasse," pp. 191–222; Chapter 7, "On the Desire for the Political," pp. 223–264).

    [Note: Berlant does not offer a direct theory of platform capitalism, but provides a powerful concept for understanding why platform labour remains attached to "hope." Cruel optimism names a subject's attachment to an object that obstructs their flourishing. Chapter 6 situates this relation within the precarious present and the time of work and life; Chapter 7 develops the difficulties of political desire and action. Read after platform labour, it raises a question technical solutions often overlook: why do workers remain dependent on "flexible, autonomous, entrepreneurial" forms of work even when these continually erode security and the ability to plan a future? Institutional alternatives must change platform ownership and address an attachment sustained jointly by hope, everyday rhythms and precarity. Chapter 1's definition must be read alongside the impasse of Chapter 6 and political desire of Chapter 7. Berlant is concerned not merely with why people cannot relinquish a harmful object, but with how they improvise a life in a persistently unstable present after the infrastructures of the "good life" fail, and why political desire does not automatically crystallize into a collective programme. This matters especially for platform labour, since flexibility may be both a platform slogan and a real need under conditions of care, migration, education or unemployment. Only by acknowledging both the material rationality of attachment and its structural costs can cruel optimism avoid becoming the simplistic claim that "workers are brainwashed." Berlant offers an affective politics of attachment rather than an economics of platform labour. People may remain attached to promises of "flexible work," "self-employment" or a "good life" even as these undermine the conditions of a stable existence. The precarious present is therefore constituted not only by wages and contracts, but also by temporal experience, hope and everyday adaptation. Labour reform that ignores these attachments will struggle to explain the enduring appeal of precarious forms.]

  2. Terranova, Tiziana. "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy" Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33–58.

    [Note: Terranova's free labor examines the relations between voluntary participation, social interaction and capitalist valorization in digital culture. It warns against reducing digital labour to "paid online work": users' creation, socializing and data production can themselves become conditions of capital extraction. Algorithmic management does not mean managers disappear. Rule designers, customer service, operations and risk teams, and capital owners remain; some commands are simply executed through interfaces, ratings and automatic deactivation. Tracing responsibility must therefore penetrate the organizational claim that "the system decided." "Free" participation, paid employment and microtask labour must remain analytically distinct, or digital labour loses its capacity to distinguish degrees of coercion. Algorithmic management has not abolished management relations; it converts some commands into task allocation, ratings, dynamic pricing and automatic deactivation. An impersonal interface can disperse responsibility without reducing workers' exposure to control. The strongest aspect of free labor is its recognition that voluntary participation and capitalist valorization can occur simultaneously. Enjoying creation, socializing or games does not stop users from producing value; conversely, calling every online activity labour erases differences in wage relations and coercion. Terranova thus offers an analytical continuum, not a simple formula that turns all of life into labour. She also reveals that capitalist valorization and cultural autonomy are not a zero-sum relation. Digital culture can genuinely create communities, aesthetics and knowledge while platforms convert these activities into traffic and data. Critique should not deny participants' autonomous meanings, but explain how value is captured within infrastructures they do not fully control. The force of free labor lies precisely in this duality: participation can be a real autonomous practice while supplying unpaid conditions for platform accumulation.]

  3. Scholz, Trebor. Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Polity Press, 2016. (Read: Chapter 4, "Crowd Fleecing"; Conclusion, especially the sections on "Tactical Refusal, Defection, and Withdrawal from Data Labor" and platform cooperativism).

    [Note: The book's central concern is not "developing a workers' Uber," but reopening the questions of who bears platform-economy risks, who controls data and who owns platforms. Chapter 4 discusses crowd fleecing; the conclusion connects refusal, defection and withdrawal with platform cooperativism. This reading avoids reducing cooperativism to a business venture, restoring its place within worker ownership, collective bargaining and infrastructure governance. Discussions of automation must especially avoid substitution fetish: a machine replacing a task does not mean the disappearance of a profession or all labour. The institutional core of platform cooperativism is not "copy an existing platform and change its owner," but the reorganization of control, surplus distribution and data governance. Cooperatives that still depend on external cloud services, capital finance or closed algorithms may find their autonomy constrained by infrastructure. Scholz's questions thus ultimately concern governance capacity and technological sovereignty beyond ownership. Platform cooperativism must also confront scale. Cooperative ownership can alter returns and decision-making rights, yet network effects, finance, software maintenance and user acquisition can still force cooperatives to depend on incumbent giants. The viability of alternatives depends on a wider institutional ecosystem of shared technology, public procurement and alliances among cooperatives. The difficulties of cooperativism extend from business ownership to the technology stack, financing and market access: platform autonomy needs a fuller institutional ecology. Only when worker ownership combines with infrastructural capacity can it produce an organizational form meaningfully different from conventional platforms. The technical conditions of cooperation cannot be treated as neutral external resources.]

  4. Woodcock, Jamie. The Fight against Platform Capitalism: An Inquiry into the Global Struggles of the Gig Economy. University of Westminster Press, 2021. (Read: Chapter 3, pp. 45–67).

    [Note: Woodcock returns collective action in platform labour to workers' practices: stoppages, disconnecting, organizing, unions and cross-platform cooperation. This creates a tension with Scholz's route of institutional alternatives: even where cooperative platforms exist, workers still need real organizational capacity and bargaining power. Cooperativism is no technological panacea. Read within this session, Woodcock's The Fight against Platform Capitalism: An Inquiry into the Global Struggles of the Gig Economy gives a more concrete structure to the question of which layers of power cooperatives, unions, labour law and commons governance each change. Algorithmic management has not abolished management relations; it turns some commands into task allocation, ratings, dynamic pricing and automatic deactivation. The interface's impersonality can disperse responsibility without weakening control over workers. Woodcock restores platform conflicts to workers' organizing, beyond alternative business models. Strikes, collective log-offs, unions and cross-platform networks show that collective action has not disappeared even when labour relations are individualized and broken into tasks. Algorithmic management may itself create shared objects of discontent. Platform labour politics thus remains centred on organizing: how can scattered experiences become sustainable collective power? Organization must also confront the technical mediation of the labour process. Personalized task allocation and dynamic pricing can weaken shared experience, yet the same interface can help workers recognize similar injustices and develop new organizing tools. Technology is both a management medium and a potential object and resource of collective action. These practices show that platform workers are not passive objects of algorithms: they develop knowledge, strategies and collective countermeasures around algorithmic rules.]

Recommended Readings:

  1. Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Polity, 2017. (Read: Chapter 2, pp. 35–63).

    [Note: Platforms are understood as economic organizations for data extraction and market intermediation. This gives the session's problem of compute concentration a prehistory in capitalist economies of scale and network effects, but platform capitalism must not simply be equated with AI capitalism. Theoretical resemblance does not automatically imply institutional identity. Srnicek treats platforms as specific business models formed through data extraction, network effects and market intermediation, supplying an economic basis for understanding their concentration. Platforms are not homogeneous: advertising, cloud, industrial and lean platforms depend on different revenue structures and asset configurations. Distinguishing these types prevents conceptual overgeneralization when examining platform labour and concentrated computing power. This typology also explains why "platforms" cannot be treated as one uniform class relation: their reliance on fixed assets, labour contracts and data differs, as do their paths to concentration. Another strength of platform capitalism is its placement of data within business competition rather than an abstract "information society." Firms accumulate data because it improves services, locks in users, trains models and erects entry barriers. Concentrated computing power and data must therefore be connected to concrete profit models, not explained only by technological scale. Platform concentration arises from network effects and positive feedback among data, capital and infrastructure; every alternative policy must specify the level at which it acts. Platform typology is thus a prerequisite for policy analysis: different mechanisms of concentration require different regulations and public alternatives. Economic distinctions precede any uniform scheme of "platform governance." Srnicek's typology also reveals differing capital intensities. Asset-light platforms depend on outsourcing and risk transfer; cloud platforms need enormous fixed capital. Both are called platforms, yet their labour organization and entry barriers differ entirely. Connecting platform capitalism with AI infrastructure especially requires distinguishing these capital structures, or "platform" will conceal the compute industry's heavy dependence on assets.]

  2. Huws, Ursula. Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age. Monthly Review Press, 2014. (Read: Chapter 1, pp. 11–38).

    [Note: Huws approaches digital labour through global divisions of labour and commodification. She reminds us that digital labour encompasses not just software engineers, but a new global labour structure formed by services, outsourcing, platforms and knowledge work. Algorithmic management does not mean that managers disappear. Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age offers not a definitive label for the relation between affective attachment to precarious life and labour institutions, but a theoretical opening that competing explanations can test; this openness is itself part of its research value. Huws situates digital labour within global commodification and divisions of labour, rejecting "knowledge workers" as the digital economy's sole subjects. Customer service, outsourcing, logistics, manufacturing and office work are all restandardized and organized at a distance through informatization. The cybertariat thus connects high and low skills, centres and peripheries, requiring digital class structures to be understood through global labour chains. A global view also corrects the equation of digital labour with remote white-collar work. High-end software and low-paid back-office services often occupy the same value chain; the former's appearance of automation may rest on the latter's standardized labour. Class analysis must address these spatially separated but functionally interdependent jobs together. It must attend to both software interfaces and supply chains, restoring visible knowledge work and hidden support work to one structure. Huws also brings households and social reproduction into the picture. Remote and flexible work does not eliminate care burdens and may allow working time to penetrate further into the home. Platforms' flexible schedules must therefore be examined with gendered reproductive responsibilities: the same "flexibility" may mean autonomy for some workers and the continual erosion of work-life boundaries for others.]

  3. Casilli, Antonio A. Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation. Foreword by Sarah T. Roberts. Translated by Saskia Brown. University of Chicago Press, 2025. Originally published in French as En attendant les robots: Enquête sur le travail du clic in 2019. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on micro-work, clickwork, data labor, and automation).

    [Note: The central point is that labour remains behind automation. Microwork, data annotation and content moderation show that AI training and operation often rely on highly dispersed, barely visible human labour. This connects "platform labour" with "AI labour." The 2025 English translation is used to bring the 2019 French study directly into dialogue with automation discourse after the rise of generative AI; its core remains hidden labour, and the book should not be misrepresented as a retrospective commentary on large models. Casilli's Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation brings the concealment of microtasks, annotation and maintenance by automation narratives into organizational and institutional analysis. His principal contribution is to decompose "automation" into the organization of extensive human microlabour. Clicking, annotating, verifying and moderating are not incidental patches outside machine intelligence; they are often necessary conditions of model training and service operation. Automation is thus not the simple disappearance of labour, but its rearrangement across space, contracts and visibility. Casilli further shows how human labour is embedded in automated feedback loops. Models continually need annotation, verification, correction and content judgments; platforms distribute these stages through crowdsourcing to global labour markets. Human-in-the-loop may be a lasting organizational form of large-scale AI services, not merely a transitional stage. Automation grows together with new labour markets. The global distribution of microlabour also complicates labour law's identification of employers. Workers may face multiple contractors, crowdsourcing platforms and the ultimate AI company, with a fragmented chain of responsibility. Automation ethics must therefore reconnect supply-chain responsibility with labour standards.]

  4. Gray, Mary L., and Siddharth Suri. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. (Read: Chapters 1–3).

    [Note: This book shows the microtasks, content moderation and platform-mediated human labour behind AI. Read with Casilli and Crawford, it reframes automation as labour redistribution and the production of labour's invisibility. Cooperativism is not a technological cure-all either. The question of which layer of power cooperatives, unions, labour law and commons governance each change, illuminated by Gray's Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, exceeds conceptual debate within the text. Ghost work exposes the infrastructural paradox of automation narratives: the more a system is described as requiring no human input, the more easily the human judgment sustaining its "intelligence" disappears. Global microtask markets split labour into discrete, on-demand units that are hard to organize, grounding technical efficiency in new forms of labour precarity. AI labour policy must therefore extend beyond technical occupations: microtask workers' wages, occupational safety, complaint channels and cross-border rights also belong to AI governance. Gray and Suri reveal an organizational paradox as well: workers are isolated into individual accounts yet rely on informal communities to exchange experiences, identify scams and help one another. Where platforms provide no stable work organization, workers create their own cooperative networks. The collectivity of digital labour has not vanished; it has moved from formal workplaces into more fragile spaces with less institutional recognition. This organization also shows that "on demand" does not mean demand arises naturally. Platforms actively shape labour markets through task decomposition, pricing and quality control. Worker replaceability is jointly manufactured by technical and contractual design, creating a direct institutional connection between labour's invisibility and technological myth.]

  5. Rosenblat, Alex. Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work. University of California Press, 2018. (Read: Chapters 2–4).

    [Note: Rosenblat examines algorithmic dispatch, prices, ratings and information asymmetry through drivers' experiences. Her concrete ethnography of algorithmic management prevents platform labour from remaining an abstract capital-labour relation. At the scale of Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work, platform labour's task decomposition, algorithmic management, risk transfer and collective action first appear as concrete relations. Automation is often achieved by hiding labour: annotation, moderation, microtasks and maintenance are distributed across global labour markets, so the claim that "machines perform the tasks" conceals new organization and risk transfer. Uber's algorithmic management does not eliminate management, but distributes commands across price signals, task allocation, ratings and information asymmetry. Drivers formally retain freedom of choice while continually responding to a platform-designed incentive environment. Rosenblat's ethnography therefore specifies how autonomy and control coexist within one labour regime. It also reveals information asymmetry as a managerial instrument. Platforms see demand, prices and driver performance together; drivers see only partial information on which to base decisions. Algorithmic management draws power not only from automated commands, but also from monopolizing a market-wide view and controlling when information is disclosed. This is a key difference from traditional on-site supervision: workers face a platform that can observe them but that they cannot easily observe. Such an information structure makes "autonomous labour" distinctly asymmetric: choice exists, yet rests on the platform's superior informational position.]

  6. Aloisi, Antonio, and Valerio De Stefano. Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour. Bloomsbury, 2022. (Read: chapters on algorithmic management and worker protection).

    [Note: This book approaches algorithmic management through labour law and institutional design. The "boss" need not be one person: it can take the form of scheduling models, performance ratings, automatic deactivation and rule systems, linking political economy with labour institutions. Aloisi's Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour, Rosenblat's Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work, and Irani's Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India place the relation between affective attachment to precarious life and labour institutions within different intellectual traditions. Algorithmic management does not mean managers disappear. Aloisi's Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour releases this relation from overly abstract judgments about the age. Automation is often accomplished by hiding labour. The contribution of Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour to this relation lies precisely in keeping theory open to refutation. Aloisi and De Stefano approach algorithmic management through labour law, restoring institutional content to the popular phrase "your boss is an algorithm." Task allocation, performance management, pricing and deactivation may be automated, but businesses still design control within labour relations and bear its legal consequences. The central question is how traditional employment classifications, rights to information and collective negotiation can adapt to impersonal management, not how to hand responsibility over to software.]

  7. Irani, Lilly. Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Princeton University Press, 2019. (Read: chapters on entrepreneurial citizenship, design and development).

    [Note: Irani studies how "innovation" becomes a moral language in governance and economic policy, and how entrepreneurial subjects are formed. Read with Berlant, she invites a question: when workers must become "innovators," "entrepreneurs" and self-managers, does power enter labour relations through the language of hope and self-realization? Through Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, the concealment of microtasks, annotation and maintenance by automation narratives can be broken into interconnected processes. Automation often works by hiding labour. From the perspective of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, this concealment cannot be separated from institutional authorization and resource allocation: technical forms produce enduring social consequences only in conjunction with organizational power. Irani examines how innovation turns from an economic slogan into a mechanism of subject formation. Design thinking, entrepreneurship education and development projects encourage individuals to redescribe social problems as entrepreneurial opportunities, while turning structural risks into personal responsibilities. Alongside platform labour, entrepreneurial citizenship explains why "precarity" can be repackaged as autonomy, flexibility and innovation. The "entrepreneurial citizen" also changes how failure is attributed. Once innovation becomes an individual duty, project failure is more readily explained as personal inadequacy than as an outcome of infrastructure, capital and policy. Self-branding, ratings and freelance culture in the platform economy continue this subjectification, recasting labour risks as personal choices.]

  8. Schor, Juliet B. After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back. University of California Press, 2020. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on platform business models, inequality, and alternatives).

    [Note: Through empirical research on sharing-economy platforms, Schor distinguishes business models, forms of labour participation and distributive outcomes, avoiding the reduction of every gig-economy experience to one model of exploitation. She is especially useful after Scholz and Woodcock: cooperativism and workers' struggles matter, but workers differ in their dependency, income structures and motivations, so alternatives cannot rely on one organizational template. Schor's After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back, Irani's Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, and van Doorn's "Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-Income Service Work in the 'On-Demand' Economy" shift the question of which layers of power cooperatives, unions, labour law and commons governance change from broad judgments to mechanisms. Cooperativism is no technological panacea. The contribution of After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back is precisely to return this question to identifiable institutional mechanisms. Automation often works by hiding labour. Schor distinguishes the sharing economy's early social visions from platforms' later commercialization, showing how venture capital and expansion reorganize narratives of efficiency, community and supplementary income. Her research indicates that the platform economy has no single path: labour conditions, ownership and community rules can produce different outcomes. The question becomes which institutional arrangements can turn sharing from marketing language into actual resource governance.]

  9. van Doorn, Niels. "Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-Income Service Work in the 'On-Demand' Economy." Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 6 (2017): 898–914. (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Van Doorn emphasizes that on-demand service work is not abstract "flexible labour," but highly gendered, racialized labour embedded in urban service relations. Connecting platform capitalism with existing low-paid services, migrant labour and social reproduction corrects analyses that begin only with interfaces or algorithmic dispatch. "Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-Income Service Work in the 'On-Demand' Economy" clarifies the causal levels of task decomposition, algorithmic management, risk transfer and collective action. By putting gendered, racialized, low-income services at the centre, van Doorn challenges the tendency to let drivers or highly skilled freelancers represent the entire gig economy. Cleaning, care and delivery already occupy unequal structures of social reproduction and migrant labour; platformization further digitizes ratings, matching and payment. Algorithms did not create these differences, but can recode and amplify them. Gender and race in the on-demand economy also show that technical mediation does not erase labour markets' historical stratification. Customer ratings, geographical matching and platform classifications can translate existing prejudices into apparently individualized transaction outcomes. Labour fairness therefore concerns algorithm design as well as institutions beyond platforms, such as migration status, care responsibilities and social protection. Platformization can shift prejudice from employers' direct judgments to dispersed customer reviews and system rankings, making responsibility for discrimination harder to locate. Algorithmization does not strip inequality of identity; it can instead sustain inequality through apparently individualized data feedback.]

  10. Graham, Mark, Isis Hjorth, and Vili Lehdonvirta. "Digital Labour and Development: Impacts of Global Digital Labour Platforms and the Gig Economy on Worker Livelihoods" Transfer 23, no. 2 (2017): 135–162. (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Graham, Hjorth and Lehdonvirta situate digital labour platforms within global development and cross-border labour markets. They examine how online outsourcing expands opportunities while generating unequal bargaining, excess supply and geographical wage differences. This extends the session from Uber-style local gigs to global remote labour, reminding us of platform labour's different spatial scales. Algorithmic management does not mean managers disappear. Their global perspective examines online outsourcing's effects on development and geographical inequality. The internet lowers cross-border transaction costs without eliminating wage disparities, language hierarchies or dependence on place. Platforms can globalize demand while leaving workers in separate social-protection systems: digital labour both crosses and exploits borders. This market also produces new replaceability. Employers can quickly move tasks between countries, while workers remain constrained by local living costs, currencies and regulations. Remote platforms create asymmetric spatial freedom: capital and tasks move more readily, while workers' social reproduction remains intensely local. The spatial politics of cross-border digital labour is thus not the "disappearance of geography," but the conversion of geographical differences into cost advantages and bargaining inequalities. Its developmental effects are double-edged: it can provide new income in peripheral regions while exploiting low wages and weak social protection to sustain global cost disparities. Developmental value must be assessed not only by job numbers, but also by bargaining power, skills accumulation, income stability and opportunities to move up the value chain. Moreover, platform ratings and global competition individualize development: workers must improve their position through skills and reputation, while exchange rates, regional wages and platform bargaining power recede into the background. Digital development policy must restore these structural factors to the picture.]

  11. Karatani, Kojin. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs. Duke University Press, 2014. Originally published 2010. (Read: Chapter 12, "Toward a World Republic," especially the discussion of Mode D, pp. 285–308).

    [Note: Karatani's Mode D is not a digital-currency proposal, but a rethinking of exchange within historical dynamics. Moving beyond capitalism understood solely as a mode of production, he places capital, the state and reciprocity within a longer history of exchange. Here, this confronts Web3, DAOs and platform cooperativism with a higher-order institutional question: if the mode of exchange remains unchanged, can changing the technical interface alone transform capital-labour relations? Through The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, the concealment of microtasks, annotation and maintenance in automation narratives can move from rhetoric to institutional analysis. Mode D's normative force lies in refusing to reduce alternatives to capitalism to a single change of ownership. Exchange, state and reciprocity are interwoven; every digital cooperative proposal must address public finance, social reproduction and coordination across regions. Karatani thus confronts "decentralized organization" with a world-historical scale beyond technical governance. His framework also makes the digital left rethink the state. Capital, state and nation are not links that can be dismantled in isolation: market expansion often works together with state redistribution and protection. Proposals to replace existing organizations with DAOs or cooperative platforms cannot easily assume the overall functions of social reproduction without addressing taxation, public services and coordination between communities. Mode D therefore cannot be reduced to a technological utopia. The real difficulty is establishing institutions that transcend the complementary structure of capital and state while providing public goods, redistribution and cross-regional coordination. Technology can only be one component.]

  12. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press, 1990. (Read: Chapter 1, pp. 1–28).

    [Note: Ostrom's empirical research challenges the reduction of common-resource governance to the "tragedy of the commons." Read alongside DAOs, the questions are how rules arise, are enforced and revised, and which participant structures can sustain shared resources. Code can implement rules, but cannot automatically create trust, participation or responsibility. Cooperativism is no technical panacea. Rather than maximizing conceptual coverage, theory should remain refutable: this framework should extend only where evidence supports its core mechanisms. Governing the Commons ultimately makes the question of which layers of power cooperatives, unions, labour law and commons governance change open to further empirical analysis, instead of a completed diagnosis of the age. Ostrom is especially useful for correcting the idea that commons mean rule-free sharing. Durable governance depends on boundaries, participatory rule-making, monitoring, graduated sanctions and conflict resolution, adapted to each community. Although digital commons have different copying costs from natural resources, open access alone cannot solve their governance problems. Ostrom's design principles cannot be mechanically transferred to digital resources. Software and data can be copied non-rivalrously, and membership may span the world; servers, maintenance and governance attention nevertheless remain scarce. What can travel is her empiricism about institutional diversity and self-organization, not a licence to call every open project a commons. The issue thus returns to institutional design: reproducibility does not remove the need for member governance, maintenance obligations and conflict resolution. Digital reproducibility reduces resource-depletion problems but heightens the scarcity of maintenance and governing attention. Code review, server costs, community management and conflict handling all require continuing investment. Ostrom reminds us that commons are never only about openness, but about durable governance suited to the character of the resource.]

Part IV: General Intellect and Technological Future (Weeks 7–8)

Session 7: General Intellect and Resistance to Compute Concentration

This session reconnects Marx's general intellect with contemporary AI infrastructure, without claiming that "Marx predicted large models." The "Fragment on Machines" in the Grundrisse addresses contradictions among social knowledge, fixed capital, labour time and the value-form: as scientific knowledge and social cooperation enter machinery more deeply, the relation between direct labour and productive power changes. Virno re-emphasizes general intellect as a living, public capacity for language and cognition, distinct from the stock of knowledge already congealed in machines. Their tension offers more productive questions about concentrated computing power than whether "AI resembles humans."

Generative AI converts socially produced text, code, images, feedback and judgment into training resources on a vast scale. At the same time, chips, data centres, energy, capital investment and specialized labour make it a form of fixed capital with high entry barriers. Pasquinelli's social history of AI, Crawford's tracing of its material and labour conditions, and studies of knowledge capitalism, cognitive capitalism and digital labour jointly show that "intelligence" is not a pure capacity detached from social relations, but an outcome of knowledge, labour, infrastructure and property arrangements together. Compute concentration is therefore first an industrial and institutional problem open to empirical analysis, not an a priori political conclusion.

Resistance cannot be reduced to "open source" or "a GPU for everyone." Open weights may improve access without altering training resources, cloud infrastructure, energy costs or governing power. Public computing resources can lower entry barriers but still face questions of data, maintenance, responsibility and distribution. Virno's exit, commons and non-state public sphere offer no ready-made solution, but a political direction for reorganizing general intellect: can shared cognitive capacities acquire institutions and infrastructure of their own, so that models, data and computation no longer exist solely as private fixed capital?

Required Readings:

  1. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Penguin Books, 1973. Originally written 1857–58; first published 1939–1941. (Read: "Fragment on Machines," pp. 690–712).

    [Note: We must resist the retrospective claim that "Marx predicted AI." Marx addresses historical contradictions among social knowledge, general intellect, fixed capital, labour time and value: as scientific knowledge and social cooperation become more embedded in machinery, labour time's place in production changes. AI can be treated as a new historical setting for this problem, but LLMs cannot simply be equated with Marx's "system of machinery." The question is whether contradictions among value, labour and ownership reappear in new forms as social intelligence increasingly congeals into privately owned computing infrastructure. The "Fragment on Machines" must be restored to Marx's analysis of fixed capital and productive forces. Machinery absorbs scientific knowledge and social cooperation, increasingly making workers supervisors and regulators of production; this creates a tension between labour time as the measure of wealth and the socialization of productive power. General intellect's place in Marx's text is not identical to its later autonomist interpretation, and this difference must be preserved. For AI, the most useful comparison concerns how knowledge enters fixed capital: do models, software, chips and data centres form a new combination of fixed capital, and which parts of training data and living cooperation resist fixation? This is first a theoretical question about social knowledge, common capacities and relations of production. Contemporary applications must explain how these capacities become fixed capital, rather than anthropomorphizing model parameters as humanity's shared mind. Marx's fragment addresses the contradictions of fixed capital, social knowledge and labour time, rather than predicting AI. General intellect's entry into machinery means that production increasingly relies on socially accumulated science and cooperation, even as the value-form retains labour time as its measure. Foundation models can provide a new setting for this contradiction, but models, data centres and GPUs are particular historical forms; they cannot retrospectively define Marx's concepts.]

  2. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. Semiotext(e), 2004. Originally published 2001. (Read: Day One, "Common Places and 'General Intellect'"; Day Two, "Intellect as Score" and "Reason of State and Exit"; Day Three, "The Emotional Tonalities of the Multitude").

    [Note: Virno's crucial development of Marx's general intellect is his refusal to understand it merely as the "total stock of knowledge" congealed in machines, fixed capital and technical systems. In "Common Places and 'General Intellect'" and "Intellect as Score," it first appears as socially shared capacities for language, knowledge, judgment and cooperation: a general condition of living labour. The central issue for AI is then not whether machines have acquired human intelligence, but how existing social cognitive capacities are reorganized through platforms, models and infrastructure. "Reason of State and Exit" advances the political question: if capital absorbs general intellect, why does emancipation not follow automatically? Virno's exit asks us to find a politics whose sole aim is not taking over existing state-corporate organizations, but reorganizing public conditions of cooperation. Today, resisting compute concentration therefore cannot mean simply replicating big tech in a more democratic form. The real question is whether society can regain data, model, computing and knowledge infrastructures, making computation serve general intellect rather than turning general intellect into raw material for compute capital. "Compute multitude" must remain a problematic concept rather than being attributed directly to Virno: it tests whether new political connections can form among general intellect, infrastructural ownership and autonomous organization. The metaphor "Intellect as Score" is especially important: a score is not an accomplished performance, but a set of public capacities realized only in concrete action. General intellect is thus not merely an object stored in fixed capital, but the common condition of speaking, cooperating, learning and judging. "Reason of State and Exit" then turns to the relation between the state and non-state publicness. Exit is neither private escape nor a technical community's flight from regulation, but a reorganization of cooperation that withdraws support from old relations. Applied to open models, public computing or federated infrastructures, each proposal must be tested: does it really change power over the organization of common capacities, or merely make tools cheaper? Virno brings general intellect out of fixed capital and back to living language, judgment, habits and cooperation. It can be organized by capital as a productive force, yet also holds possibilities for non-state publicness. Exit is not simply leaving institutions, but reorganizing the conditions of cooperation. For contemporary computing, the political focus is not whether machines possess intelligence, but whether common cognitive capacities can establish their own data, model and computing infrastructures.]

  3. Pasquinelli, Matteo. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. Verso, 2023. (Read: Chapter 4, "The Origins of Marx's General Intellect"; Chapter 7, "The Automation of Pattern Recognition"; Conclusion, "The Automation of General Intelligence").

    [Note: Pasquinelli places AI back within histories of the division of labour and pattern recognition, rather than treating it as a computational miracle detached from society. Chapter 4 retraces Marx's general intellect; Chapter 7 examines pattern recognition and automation; the conclusion carries these histories into the automation of general intelligence. For this session, "model training" becomes a question of organizing labour and knowledge rather than a purely technical operation: does AI automate one person's skill, an occupation, or collective cognitive capacities already formed by society? The book's social history asks us to understand intelligence alongside the division of labour: machine intelligence often extracts rules, patterns and statistical order from human work, then reorganizes that work in automated form. Chapter 4 returns to general intellect not to announce that Marx already explained AI, but to ask how knowledge becomes a productive apparatus. Chapter 7's historicization of pattern recognition dismantles the myth of deep learning "learning by itself from data." General intelligence in the conclusion is therefore first a social and institutional question: which general capacities are formalized, who determines the patterns, and who must adapt to patterns recognized by machines? Reconstructing AI through labour division and pattern recognition means machine learning is no longer intelligence suddenly emerging from pure mathematics. Automation often first extracts and formalizes rules of judgment from social practice, then delegates their execution to machines. General intelligence's history connects to histories of organization, measurement and management. What AI "automates" is not an abstract mind, but already socialized cognitive operations.]

  4. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Press, 2004. (Read: Part 2, selected sections on immaterial labor, biopolitical production, and the common).

    [Note: Hardt and Negri connect multitude, immaterial labour, biopolitical production and the common. As production increasingly depends on language, knowledge, affects and cooperation, they argue that political subjectivity need not take the homogeneous industrial worker as its sole premise. After Marx and Virno, they offer a more explicit vision of political organization, but one that must face empirical correction from platform-labour research: widespread social cooperation does not automatically produce autonomous subjects, and capital can still capture cooperation through property, platforms and infrastructure. In the context of this session, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire makes the difficulties of moving from theoretical multitude/common to sustainable institutions more concrete. General intellect cannot simply be equated with model parameters, datasets or the internet. It first names socialized capacities for language, knowledge, judgment and cooperation; fixed capital can absorb these capacities without making them fully identical with machines. Hardt and Negri emphasize the conjunction of common productive capacities and differentiated subjects, seeking a politics distinct from a homogeneous people or the traditional working class. This openness connects well to digital cooperation, but is easily romanticized through network metaphors. The real question is how dispersed cooperation acquires institutional durability, resources and decision-making structures; otherwise, "multitude" may remain political rhetoric that describes connections. Its affinity with digital networks readily invites technological optimism. Networked common production does not automatically generate common politics, nor do different subjects naturally form a stable will. The difficult task is building institutions for decision-making and resources without erasing difference. This brings multitude theory directly to governance.]

Recommended Readings:

  1. Vercellone, Carlo. "From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect" Historical Materialism 15, no. 1 (2007): 13–36.

    [Note: Vercellone examines the entry of knowledge, cooperation and social intelligence into capital accumulation. He bridges Sessions 6 and 7: questions of labour organization ultimately lead to who owns general intellect and knowledge commons. Theoretical resemblance does not automatically imply institutional identity. Compute concentration concerns industrial structure and infrastructure. The scale requirements of chips, energy, capital and cloud services shape who can train, deploy and maintain models, so open weights cannot by themselves remove dependence on private infrastructure. The account of general intellect, fixed capital, cognitive labour and concentrated computing power in "From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect" is therefore valid only where the relevant institutional mechanisms can be identified empirically. Vercellone connects general intellect with capital's absorption of social knowledge, emphasizing production's increasing dependence on cooperation and knowledge beyond factory walls. Cognitive capitalism places rent, intellectual property and socialized production within a shared contradiction. For AI, it offers not the conclusion that knowledge has replaced labour, but an analysis of how capital re-establishes scarcity and control over common knowledge that is difficult to enclose completely. It also returns rent to analysis of the knowledge economy. Where common knowledge resists full privatization, capital may increasingly earn returns through patents, platform gateways and infrastructure ownership. AI models' enclosure of knowledge and API access can be examined this way, but whether they constitute rent requires concrete analysis of competition, property and pricing. By connecting formal/real subsumption with general intellect, Vercellone also tries to explain capital's movement from directly organizing labour toward controlling conditions of socialized knowledge. Even if this periodization is contested, it asks an important question: when production depends on broad social cooperation, which institutions convert dispersed cooperation back into private returns? Platforms and AI infrastructure supply new empirical objects for this question.]

  2. Moulier Boutang, Yann. Cognitive Capitalism. Translated by Ed Emery. Polity, 2011. Originally published in French as Le capitalisme cognitif in 2007. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on knowledge, externalities, and cognitive labor).

    [Note: Moulier Boutang's cognitive capitalism places knowledge, innovation, cooperative networks and positive externalities at the centre of value production, explaining why production increasingly exceeds traditional factory boundaries. It is close to general intellect but not synonymous with it: Marx and Virno address social intelligence's relation to capital, whereas cognitive capitalism is an empirical-theoretical name for a particular capitalist phase. Reading them together tests what it means for knowledge to become the main productive force. Compute concentration is a matter of industry and infrastructure. Cognitive Capitalism offers not a final designation for the reorganization of common capacities through property, platforms and infrastructure, but a theoretical opening testable by competing explanations; that openness is itself valuable. Moulier Boutang describes knowledge, innovation and positive externalities as prominent in accumulation, incorporating cooperation beyond the factory into value analysis. "Cognitive" must not obscure material production, but it helps explain why networks, patents, education and knowledge flows become crucial to capitalist competition. Applied to AI, this requires attending both to models' cognitive resources and to the energy, hardware and labour supporting them. Cognitive capitalism also confronts labour measurement. Knowledge production relies heavily on cooperation, education and social interaction, making individual contributions harder to isolate; capital nevertheless distributes income through wages, intellectual property and firm boundaries. Model training amplifies this contradiction: its materials come from extensive social production, while returns concentrate among a few infrastructure owners.]

  3. Gorz, André. The Immaterial: Knowledge, Value and Capital. Translated by Chris Turner. Seagull Books, 2010. Originally published in French as L'Immatériel in 2003. (Read: selected chapters on knowledge, value, and the crisis of measurability).

    [Note: Gorz examines a contradiction: knowledge, capacities and living social experience resist complete measurement by conventional labour time, yet capital continually converts them into appropriable resources. He belongs in the general-intellect lineage because he restores knowledge from abstract information to subjective capacities and social relations while raising a crisis of value measurement. For AI, we must ask whether training commodifies knowledge itself, or turns its expressions, data traces and access rights into assets. The Immaterial: Knowledge, Value and Capital brings the distinction between openness, interoperability, public ownership and autonomous governance to organizational and institutional analysis. Compute concentration concerns industrial structure and infrastructure. Gorz locates cognitive capitalism's central contradiction between reproducible knowledge and the manufacture of scarcity. The easier digital knowledge is to copy, the more capital must recreate exclusion through intellectual property, platform enclosure and service provision. Foundation models and the API economy give this a new form: absorbed public knowledge re-enters the market through controlled access. By stressing knowledge's immeasurability, Gorz makes value impossible to explain fully through individual labour time. Knowledge often comes from long education, public research and social interaction, while copying costs approach zero; patents, closed platforms and brands must reconstruct scarcity. Generative AI's mass absorption of public text makes the contradiction between common knowledge and private access more visible. Gorz also helps explain model-access rights: capital need not own knowledge itself if control of computation, interfaces and service conditions makes access to common knowledge scarce again. Appropriation shifts from ownership of content to ownership of infrastructure.]

  4. Roggero, Gigi. The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Translated by Enda Brophy. Temple University Press, 2011. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on living knowledge, the university, and cognitive labor).

    [Note: Roggero examines the production of living knowledge through universities and knowledge work. Cognitive labour is not an abstract "creative class," but forms within educational institutions, labour markets, cooperative networks and conflict. This returns general intellect from grand philosophical claims to universities, research, training and intellectual-property regimes, making it useful for examining tensions between common knowledge production and institutional appropriation as generative AI enters education and research. The difficulty of moving from theoretical multitude/common to sustainable institution-building in The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America exceeds conceptual debate within the text. Compute concentration is an industrial and infrastructural problem. Roggero places living knowledge within university crisis and labour transformation, stressing that knowledge is continually generated in social cooperation, learning and networks, not only formal research institutions. Universities produce public knowledge while commodifying and quantifying it. Foundation models' mass absorption of academic and public texts intensifies the contradiction, creating new appropriative relations between open social knowledge and private computing infrastructure. For Roggero, the university is not a pure public space outside knowledge capitalism, but a laboratory of labour transformation: research, teaching and learning increasingly undergo performance measurement, project-based organization and competitive funding. Connected with AI, this perspective shows academic knowledge becoming open text for model ingestion while publishing, platforms and computing resources restratify it.]

  5. Beller, Jonathan. The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital. Pluto Press, 2018. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on computational capital, attention, and racialized extraction).

    [Note: Beller places computation within histories of capital, visual culture, financialization and racialized violence. Computation is not confined to operations inside machines, but belongs to broader social extraction of value. This creates a necessary tension with general intellect: treating social knowledge only as an emancipatory common capacity risks overlooking its production within differentiated violence, attention capture and global divisions of labour. At the scale of The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital, relations among general intellect, fixed capital, cognitive labour and compute concentration first appear as concrete connections. Beller understands computational capitalism as a system in which perception, attention and infrastructure jointly participate in valorization, extending digital labour's boundaries. His strong claims require empirical limits, yet identify a crucial issue: computation is not a neutral background tool, but may become a general substrate through which capital organizes vision, time and social relations. The concept of substrate connects visual culture, computation and material foundations. Screen-based attention becomes capitalizable only within systems of chips, networks, energy and labour. Computational capital is therefore neither a pure information economy nor a simple extension of industrial capital, but a form of value capture organized through multiple infrastructural layers. Computation's apparent immateriality is rematerialized: the valorization of attention, images and data always depends on equipment, networks and labour below. Its analysis needs a double view of the politics of perception and material infrastructure. Losing either side abstracts computational capital again.]

  6. Tronti, Mario. Workers and Capital. Translated by David Broder. Verso, 2019. Originally published 1966. (Read: "Lenin in England," pp. 78–88).

    [Note: Tronti's significance is methodological: begin not with what capital wants, but with how workers' struggles force capital to change. For today's platform economy, this is a research method, not proof that "workers' struggles produced AI." Workers and Capital, Beller's The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital, and Doctorow's The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation situate the reorganization of shared social capacities through property, platforms and infrastructure within different intellectual traditions. Workers and Capital releases this question from overly abstract judgments about the age. The contribution of Workers and Capital lies precisely in keeping the theory refutable. Tronti reminds us that technological change cannot be explained only through capital's innovation strategies. Workers' refusal, mobility, organization and conflicts in production can also force capital to find new management technologies and labour arrangements. Applied to automation, this means tracing historical links between concrete struggles and investment decisions, not romanticizing automation itself as a direct product of workers' struggles. His workerism also insists that political knowledge comes from inquiry within struggles, rather than defining workers' interests in advance. For platform and AI labour, research should begin with specific conflicts involving drivers, annotators, moderators and engineers, examining how workplaces reinterpret technology. Theory must not position workers merely as passive recipients of technical change.]

  7. Doctorow, Cory. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Verso, 2023. (Read: Introduction; chapters on interoperability, switching costs, and antitrust).

    [Note: Doctorow translates "seizing the means of computation" into concrete institutional tools—interoperability, adversarial compatibility, antitrust and exit rights—rather than an ownership slogan. This provides a valuable intermediate policy level: if platform infrastructure encloses general intellect, must resistance first reduce lock-in and restore interoperability and migration? We must also ask whether these reforms reach ownership of data centres, computation and capital, or mainly improve competition. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation allows the distinction between openness, interoperability, public ownership and autonomous governance to be broken into interconnected elements. "Seizing the means of computation" restores competition policy, interoperability and user rights to the centre of infrastructure politics. Technical openness that leaves exit costs, data migration and market control unchanged often offers only superficial choice. This reformist path allows productive comparison with more radical public ownership or cooperative governance. Interoperability has a specific meaning for power: if users can take their data, social connections and content elsewhere and connect different services, lock-in decreases. Yet interoperability also brings complex costs involving security, privacy and standards governance. "Opening interfaces" is therefore no unconditional answer, but a mechanism of competition and autonomy requiring public rules. Its political significance is to shift competition from "more platforms" to whether users genuinely possess the institutional capacity to leave and migrate.]

  8. Tarnoff, Ben. Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future. Verso, 2022. (Read: Introduction; chapters on privatization, public ownership, and democratic control).

    [Note: Tarnoff connects the history of internet privatization with public control, rejecting explanations that attribute platform power only to a few bad firms or algorithms. His approach is infrastructural politics: ownership, public investment, democratic governance and decommodification. With Doctorow, this opens a debate over reform's scale: are interoperability and competition policy enough, or must some internet layers be reconceived as public infrastructure? Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, Doctorow's The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, and Schneider's Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life shift the difficulty of moving from theoretical multitude/common to durable institutions from broad judgment to concrete mechanisms. The contribution of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future is to return these broad claims to identifiable institutional mechanisms. By treating privatization as historical, Tarnoff breaks with the assumption that networks naturally belong to markets. Public funding, commercialization and advertising together shaped today's platforms; decommercialization must therefore involve financing and public institutions, not merely appeals to corporate ethics. The internet's public character becomes a question of ownership and institutional design.]

  9. Schneider, Nathan. Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. University of California Press, 2024. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on governance, ownership, and democratic design).

    [Note: Schneider begins with online communities' governance practices. Digital spaces are neither naturally anarchic nor governable only by corporations; rules, membership, ownership and decision procedures can all be redesigned. There are distant resonances with Virno's exit and Kelty's recursive public, but the focus here is institution-building: without sustainable governance, "exit" from platform power can amount merely to moving to another private platform. Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life clarifies the causal levels connecting general intellect, fixed capital, cognitive labour and compute concentration. Schneider treats online spaces as capable of constitutional governance, asking how rules form, members gain representation and power is constrained, rather than praising democracy abstractly. Democratization requires enforceable procedures, not simply a voting feature added to an interface. Governable spaces require more than community rules: members must have an institutional position from which to change them. Platform democracy cannot be equated with surveys or voting plug-ins. If servers, code and final enforcement remain with outside owners, participation may lack binding force. The substantive test is not whether a participation button exists, but whether members can durably constrain rules, infrastructure and enforcement. Only when governing rights can bind infrastructure owners does digital participation become institutional power rather than consultation. Democratic design must ultimately reach enforcement.]

  10. Söderberg, Johan. Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. Routledge, 2008. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on free software, labor, and political economy).

    [Note: Söderberg explains free/open-source software through labour and political economy, recognizing cooperation's potential beyond conventional firms while examining capital's recapture of unpaid contributions. This tests a recurring question: does open code mean common ownership? Where cloud computing, deployment channels and data remain concentrated, where is the political force of software commons weakened? Free software shows that control of technical means of production can be institutionalized through licences, cooperative norms and shared code. Yet it can both challenge property and be absorbed by capital as cheap innovation. Openness is not a pure space outside capital, but a continually contested production relation. The movement also demonstrates non-state institutional innovation: copyleft repurposes law to protect sharing and resist private re-enclosure. "Exiting capital" need not mean exiting law; autonomous practices often use existing law to build lasting boundaries. This directly informs data and model commons. Commons do not require abolishing institutional boundaries: appropriate legal design can support public production. Licences and governance for public models and open data may similarly prevent re-enclosure. Sustained openness is itself an institutional achievement. Free software also develops material and institutional dependencies. Projects need hosting, maintenance, funding and contributor governance; if these concentrate again in a few firms, open code can coexist with infrastructural dependence. Open models likewise require distinct examination of property relations governing weights, training data, computation and deployment platforms.]

  11. Lazzarato, Maurizio. "Immaterial Labor" In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, 133–147. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Originally published in Italian in 1994. (Read: entire chapter).

    [Note: Lazzarato's immaterial labour names the importance of information, cultural content, communication and subjectivity production under post-Fordism. Influential for general intellect, it requires a double reading today: it captures production's spread into social communication, yet "immaterial" can obscure chips, minerals, logistics, annotation and bodily labour. Reading it with Session 6 exposes this limit. "Immaterial Labor" can turn the distinction among openness, interoperability, public ownership and autonomous governance from rhetoric into institutional analysis. The concept captures language, affect, knowledge and cooperation entering value production, but its boundaries require care. Cognitive and communicative activities do not become detached from material labour; they depend on equipment manufacturing, logistics, energy and reproductive work. Reconnecting the two prevents "immaterial" from hiding the digital economy's material foundations. Historically, the concept links post-Fordism, communication and subject production, emphasizing labour's increasingly direct production of cultural content and social relations. Its difficulty is the potential concealment of equipment, logistics and bodies. It is better read as a change in labour's content and forms of control, not a declaration that material production has departed. Only then can it connect to digital labour's layered structure. Its greatest value lies not in the label, but in identifying value production's growing dependence on communication, signs and subjective relations. Digital capitalism concerns how these activities and material foundations are recombined, not which replaces the other.]

  12. Dyer-Witheford, Nick, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, and James Steinhoff. Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. Pluto Press, 2019. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on AI, labor, and capital).

    [Note: This book examines AI automation and capital through Marxist political economy, rejecting an exclusive focus on whether future machines will be conscious. It studies how machine learning reorganizes capital's powers of control as it enters production, management and labour markets. This reconnects general intellect with AI's actual political economy while setting empirical limits for the next session's philosophy and future imaginaries. Inhuman Power locates AI within capitalist automation's historical logic, rather than treating it as an independent technical subject. Machine learning expands capital's capacities for prediction, coordination and supervision while depending on existing divisions of labour and property structures. "Inhuman power" is therefore first a technical capacity organized through social relations. Inhuman Power also juxtaposes AI's autonomy with capital's: machine systems appear to gain agency, yet their goals, deployment and expansion remain shaped by accumulation. Technical autonomy and capital's autonomy are different concepts. Distinguishing them prevents corporate investment and management decisions from being anthropomorphized as "AI demanding acceleration." Machine autonomy becomes an organizational question again: expanding capabilities do not remove capital's decisions over deployment and returns. AI's political economy must distinguish technical capability growth from the social direction given by capital's organization. The capitalist framework of Inhuman Power also corrects the philosophical image of AI as an autonomous actor. Algorithms' goals do not naturally arise inside machines, but are supplied by investment, strategy, competition and management needs. Capabilities may develop complexities beyond individual designers' expectations, yet deployment still has identifiable institutional actors. System complexity cannot justify anthropomorphically transferring political responsibility.]

Session 8: Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Posthuman Futures

The final session places AI at the intersection of philosophy, engineering, political economy and future imaginaries. Turing's classic questions about machine intelligence, Russell's account of human-machine goals, Bostrom's superintelligence risk framework, and Brassier's, Land's and Negarestani's different approaches to reason, technology and acceleration are not the same kind of argument. They involve operational tests, engineering control, thought experiments, normative philosophy and metaphysical inference, and cannot substitute for one another under a single evidential standard. Nor should AGI be treated as an empirical object with an already stable definition and timetable. It must be differentiated into questions of capability, autonomy, generality, deployment conditions and institutional power.

Haraway, Hayles, Braidotti and Hui reconsider the boundaries of "the human" through posthumanism, embodiment, relationality and technological plurality. Posthumanism does not mean enhancing humans or uploading consciousness, nor does it necessarily imply technological optimism. It first challenges the traditional placement of reason, subjectivity and political standing within the individual human. In another register, Crawford, Bender/Hanna, Narayanan/Kapoor and Hao repeatedly return grand intelligence narratives to data, labour, energy, corporate organization, industrial competition and marketing, bringing the "future" back into present institutions.

The session therefore asks how narratives of the future themselves become political forces. Industry roadmaps, risk discourse, accelerationism and emancipatory visions of technology predefine what counts as feasible, necessary or inevitable. AI critique must neither reduce every capability to hype nor accept the industry's unified category of "intelligence" because some systems do possess significant capabilities. Actual performance, speculative risk, political-economic structures and normative futures require distinct arguments. Only clear connections among these levels can take discussions of automation and the posthuman beyond oscillation between technological worship and fear.

Required Readings:

  1. Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press, 2021. (Read: Introduction; Chapter 2, "Labor"; Chapter 3, "Data").

    [Note: Crawford returns general intellect to planetary materiality. AI depends not only on algorithms and models, but also on minerals, energy, data centres, annotation, moderation and global supply chains. Chapter 2 makes AI's labour visible again; Chapter 3 shows how data becomes a resource. With Marx and Virno, this raises a concrete question: if AI privatizes social intelligence while hiding material labour and ecological costs behind models, why does "intelligence" consistently appear disembodied? Crawford corrects our understanding of AI's actual conditions rather than directly extending general intellect. Atlas of AI uses scales such as Earth, Labor and Data to examine an industrial system of extraction: minerals, energy and space make computation possible; annotation and maintenance are concealed by automation narratives; datasets carry histories of classification into models. Alongside Hao's organizational investigation and Bender/Hanna's critique of hype, "what is AI?" becomes a composite of technical capability, industrial foundations and institutional power rather than an abstract question of intelligence. This final session must distinguish present capability judgments from philosophical possibility. A system's inability today cannot logically prove machines will never do something; conversely, the conceptual possibility of superintelligence cannot establish the political priority of present deployments. Crawford's atlas disassembles AI into a planetary assemblage of minerals, energy, labour, data, classification and state power. AI is not floating software capability, but a highly material and institutional system. Restoring workers, mines and data centres changes risk's timescale: political consequences do not begin only with future superintelligence, but already exist in extraction, work organization and classificatory institutions.]

  2. Bender, Emily M., and Alex Hanna. The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want. Harper, 2025. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on AI hype, synthetic media, labor, and institutional power).

    [Note: Bender and Hanna first disassemble "AI" into industrial discourse, institutional choices and concrete technical systems, opposing the anthropomorphism of machine-learning products as intelligent subjects with a unified will. They examine how hype diverts attention: society may debate distant machine domination while overlooking data, labour, resources, business models and present automation harms. Published in 2025, this text returns discussion to the new narratives following generative AI, complementing Crawford's material politics. AI is a highly heterogeneous umbrella term. Predictive and generative models, robots, optimization systems and hypothetical AGI should not share one capability assessment. Judgments must identify their specific technical object, rather than allowing "AI" to replace classification. Critique of industry discourse must stay connected to particular systems, organizations and observable effects, avoiding another grand anthropomorphic story in place of technical myth. Their focus is not only model limitations, but how exaggerated abilities serve investment, concentration and policy agendas. Compared with technical-risk accounts, this turns attention to existing institutional consequences: who can define AI, who benefits from its myths, and who bears deployment costs? Hype has political effects because it changes resource allocation. Grand narratives of general intelligence and automated substitution influence investment, talent, regulatory priorities and public attention, marginalizing some current problems. Critiquing hype does not deny technical change; it demands a stricter evidential connection between capability claims and social decisions. Demystification therefore does not diminish technology's importance, but returns judgments to testable capabilities, institutions and resource relations.]

  3. Narayanan, Arvind, and Sayash Kapoor. AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference. Princeton University Press, 2024. (Read: Chapter 1, "Introduction"; Chapter 2, "How Predictive AI Goes Wrong"; Chapter 4, "The Long Road to Generative AI").

    [Note: Narayanan and Kapoor offer a technological-epistemological "disenchantment." They distinguish predictive AI, generative AI and broader AI discourse, stressing capability boundaries and deployment conditions. This is crucial here: critical theory must distinguish actual technical capabilities from the "AI" of industry promotion. AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference thus offers a limited but effective scale for explaining how resources, labour, ecology and organizational history constrain AGI futurism. It identifies mechanisms without replacing further analysis of institutions, law and material conditions. Different technical objects require different evidence; predictive failure, generative capabilities and AGI imaginaries are not interchangeable. Critique that treats all systems as one intelligence reproduces marketing's vagueness. Demystification begins with classification. A key method of AI Snake Oil is matching every capability claim to its use case. Benchmark performance cannot automatically demonstrate suitability for hiring, education or medical decisions; fluent text cannot demonstrate factual reliability. Evaluation must move from abstract abilities to deployment conditions, error costs and alternatives. This distinction is especially useful at the reading group's close, preventing philosophical futurism and real system capabilities from substituting for each other within one concept of "AI."]

  4. Hao, Karen. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. Penguin Press, 2025. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on OpenAI's scaling strategy, data labor, compute infrastructure, and global environmental impacts).

    [Note: Through long-term investigative reporting, Hao reconstructs OpenAI and the AI race, connecting model expansion with computing power, capital, data labour, global supply chains and environmental conflict. Rather than abstract AI philosophy, organizational history and global cases show how "scaling" became industrial strategy. Its place among the final session's required readings demands that philosophical projections of AGI, superintelligence and posthuman futures face actual organizations and resource politics: who builds these systems, who bears the costs, and who can define the future? Posthuman critique must not escape material politics. Challenging anthropocentrism matters, but concrete institutions still allocate minerals, labour, energy, ecological costs and intellectual property; relational theories of subjectivity must be read with these structures. In this session, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI makes conflicts over technological futures among risk governance, emancipatory imagination and democratic institutions concrete. AI is first a heterogeneous collection of objects: predictive and generative models, robots, optimization systems and hypothetical AGI have different capability and risk structures. One undifferentiated concept of intelligence quickly blurs empirical judgment. Through OpenAI's history, Hao places AGI ideals, financing, organizational governance and the compute race in one narrative. Its value is not only corporate inside information, but showing how the normative aim of benefiting all humanity encounters institutional pressures in commercial expansion, competition for talent and infrastructure investment. AI futurism is not a history of ideas detached from organizations, but bound to governance and capital structures. Corporate history also shows why governance cannot rely solely on mission statements. Organization, boards, investors and computing resources alter how far a mission can constrain commercial decisions. Public interest existing only as corporate self-regulation is easily reinterpreted under competition to scale.]

Recommended Readings:

  1. Turing, Alan M. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433–460. (Read: entire article).

    [Note: Turing's most important move is not asking "Can machines think?" but reformulating the question. Through the imitation game, a catalogue of objections and learning machines, he asks which behavioural criteria can make machine intelligence an operational object of research. Read after AI discourse of the 2020s, intelligence appears not as a transparent natural property, but as something defined by tests, tasks and institutional expectations. This final session must distinguish actual capability from philosophical possibility. Theoretical resemblance does not automatically imply institutional identity. Turing's paper is better understood as a methodological shift in how to discuss machine intelligence than as an AGI roadmap. The imitation game temporarily suspends metaphysical debates about thought's essence, replacing them with operational behavioural criteria. This opens computational intelligence research while leaving a persistent question: tests can measure performance, but cannot automatically settle understanding, subjectivity or social responsibility. Turing also anticipates objections to machine intelligence and shows their logical weaknesses. The point is not that he proves machines think, but that he moves debate from essential definitions to testable questions. We should preserve this restraint today: passing a test warrants judgments about that tested capability. Behaviour can be evidence without immediately yielding conclusions about consciousness, understanding or subjectivity. Turing offers conceptual discipline for discussing intelligence, not a prophecy of technology's future. His operationalism also leaves an acute contemporary problem: increasingly diverse tests reveal systems excelling at some tasks while lacking robustness at others. Should intelligence remain a single umbrella term, or be differentiated into abilities? This directly concerns the scope and evidential standards of generative-AI capability claims.]

  2. Russell, Stuart. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking, 2019. (Read: Introduction; selected chapters on objectives, uncertainty, and the control problem).

    [Note: Russell raises control and alignment from within AI research. Rather than predicting a definite superintelligence catastrophe, he critiques the design assumption that fixes machine goals in advance as a single utility function. He proposes that machines remain uncertain about human preferences. With critical theory, we should ask how those preferences form, who may represent them, and whether social conflict can be reduced to preference learning. AI is a highly heterogeneous umbrella term. Russell formulates advanced-AI risk through goal specification and uncertainty management: if human-given goals are treated as a perfectly certain utility function, increasing capability may magnify specification errors. This deserves dialogue with social science, because preferences are neither unified, transparent nor static. Alignment thus concerns not only control engineering but value conflict, democratic authorization and institutional representation. "Human values" cannot simply be entered into a system as one unified object. Groups genuinely conflict, and values change with context. Treating alignment only as preference learning risks compressing democratic disagreement, rights and non-negotiable principles into optimizable variables. Technical control necessarily leads to political philosophy. In actual institutions, Russell's problem must also handle multiple actors. When a system serves a hospital, company, state or individual, whose preferences prevail? Values cannot always be compressed into one objective function. Alignment therefore needs procedural justice, limits imposed by rights and democratic decision-making; otherwise, "human compatible" may presuppose a unified human will that does not exist.]

  3. Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto" In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 149–181. Routledge, 1991.

    [Note: Haraway's cyborg is not merely a prediction of human-machine fusion, but a theory of political subjects that dismantles boundaries. It asks whether politics must rest on a pure biological body and unified identity, offering the multitude an image of coalition without homogeneity. "A Cyborg Manifesto" brings the question of how resources, labour, ecology and organizational history constrain AGI futurism into institutional and organizational analysis. Cyborg politics rejects pure, unified, naturalized identities as foundations for coalition. Technical practices continually redraw human/machine and nature/culture boundaries, while heterogeneous relations constitute political subjects. Its relevance to AI lies not in a fusion prophecy, but in reorganizing responsibility and solidarity without an essentialist account of human nature. Cyborg politics is also anti-essentialist coalition-building: instead of pure womanhood, humanity or natural identity, Haraway stresses partial connections formed where technology, bodies and power intertwine. For the AI age, the point is not that everyone becomes half-machine, but that political subjects are already constituted through technical and social relations. Responsibility and solidarity cannot therefore rest on recovering a pure pre-technological humanity. The cyborg also challenges technology as an external tool. Bodies, medicine, communication and labour have long been remade by technical devices; humans have never been independent subjects outside technology. "Protecting humanity" in AI governance must specify the capacities, relations and conditions of life to be protected, rather than invoking abstract pure human nature. Haraway turns this hybridity into a political resource instead of a technology-induced identity crisis.]

  4. Hayles, N. Katherine. Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts. University of Chicago Press, 2025. (Read: Chapters 1–2, 6–7, and 9–10).

    [Note: In this 2025 book, Hayles proposes an integrated cognitive framework, extending cognition and meaning-making from humans to living organisms and some artificial systems while retaining an emphasis on materiality, embodiment and relation. It is more suited than How We Became Posthuman to contemporary AI debates because it directly addresses GPT-era claims about machine cognition without equating language models with human minds. Its value is a third theoretical route between strong anthropocentrism and the declaration that machines are already subjects. Posthuman critique must not become an escape from material politics. The contest over technological futures among risk governance, emancipatory imagination and democratic institutions in Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts extends beyond internal conceptual debate. Hayles distributes cognition across relations among humans, nonhuman life and technical systems, so intelligence is no longer simply an isolated subject's internal capacity. This 2025 account connects ecology with AI: technical systems are embedded in biological symbiosis while altering how humans understand cognitive boundaries. Posthuman futures are thus first reorganizations of relations, not upgrades to one species. Hayles further treats cognition as a process across scales: bacteria and technical systems may sense and respond to environments differently. Cognitive pluralism rejects human reason as the sole measure without equating all information processing with human intelligence. Its key contribution is a vocabulary for distinguishing forms of cognition, freeing posthuman debate from oscillation between human exceptionalism and machine anthropomorphism.]

  5. Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2014. (Read: Chapter 8, "Is the Default Outcome Doom?", pp. 115–142).

    [Note: Bostrom offers an existential-risk framework quite different from accelerationist philosophy. One need not accept a doom scenario in advance; the task is to examine the argument: if we posit a highly autonomous, goal-directed agent, why does alignment become central? Comparison with political economy asks whether AI risk can be abstracted into a purely technical issue detached from property, labour and institutions. The final session must distinguish actual capability from philosophical possibility. At the scale of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, distinguishing AI capabilities, industrial hype, philosophical intelligence and political-economic reality begins with concrete relations. Technological futures are not purely objects of prediction. Industry roadmaps, risk narratives and accelerationism affect investment, regulation and public imagination, so what will happen and who can define the future must be discussed together. Through Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, the distinction becomes a stricter question: which mechanisms actually change, which changes are only shifts of medium, and who bears their consequences? Bostrom assumes extreme capability growth and goal preservation to derive existential risk and the control problem. The value is a clear structure of reasoning about future risks; the limitation is heavy dependence on assumptions about agents, goals and technical paths. Juxtaposing it with present political economy distinguishes long-range scenario analysis from already observable infrastructural power.]

  6. Brassier, Ray. "Prometheanism and Its Critics" In #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, 467–488. Urbanomic, 2014.

    [Note: Brassier's value is not an AI development roadmap, but his problematization of technology, reason and political emancipation. The focus is why he refuses to treat naturalness, authenticity and organic life automatically as measures of progress. This forces a distinction between anti-technology and anti-capitalism: if technology can itself be reorganized, can rejecting it really bring emancipation? We must also test Prometheanism's dangers: might a politics of universal reason again dominate difference and ecological conditions? "Prometheanism and Its Critics," Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, and Land's "Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration" locate the different problems of automation, control, alignment and posthuman subjectivity in distinct intellectual traditions. AI is a heterogeneous umbrella term. Brassier's essay releases these problems from excessively abstract judgments of the age. Technological futures are not merely predictive objects. The essay contributes by keeping theory refutable. Brassier connects technical transformation with reason's self-correction, rejecting the assumption that every practice exceeding existing nature or tradition expresses domination. This challenges technological pessimism, but must also answer who can transform the world and which institutions determine technical direction. Detached from political economy, Prometheanism can easily abstract unequal real technical capacities into the universal capacity of "humanity."]

  7. Land, Nick. "Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration" In #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, 511–520. Urbanomic, 2014.

    [Note: Land is this session's strongest counter-pole. He describes capital, technology and self-acceleration as dynamics beyond human will. The value of reading him lies not in accepting his extremes, but in asking what place remains for political subjects once capital is imagined as a self-accelerating system. With Brassier, differences between left and right accelerationism over reason, capital and the future become visible. "Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration" allows the constraints that resources, labour, ecology and organizational history place on AGI futurism to be separated into connected processes. Technological futures are not purely predictive objects. From the perspective of Land's essay, these constraints cannot be considered apart from institutional authorization and resource distribution: technical forms produce durable social effects only with organizational power. Land describes capital and technical acceleration as self-organization beyond human political control, taking accelerationism to an anti-humanist extreme. As a counter-text, it exposes the logic that naturalizes capital's dynamics: once acceleration becomes unstoppable, politics is left with adaptation or exit. Critique must re-establish how institutions, labour and collective action can still alter technical trajectories. Land also provides an extreme test of inevitability rhetoric. When capital's acceleration transcends political choice, institutions and collective action are declared ineffective in advance. Critiquing this requires more than advocating deceleration: we must distinguish technical speed, capitalist competition and social goals, showing that their directions do not necessarily coincide.]

  8. Negarestani, Reza. Intelligence and Spirit. Urbanomic, 2018. (Read: Part I, especially Chapter 1, pp. 1–52).

    [Note: Negarestani shifts intelligence from whether machines can reproduce the human brain to concepts, inference, self-correction and normativity. This is speculative philosophy, not a technical roadmap. It confronts critical theory with a difficult question: if intelligence should not be defined as a natural human property, how should the political difference between "artificial" and "natural" intelligence be understood? Intelligence and Spirit, Land's "Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration," and Hui's Recursivity and Contingency move contests over technological futures among risk governance, emancipatory imagination and democracy from broad judgments to mechanisms. Posthuman critique must not escape material politics. Historical analogies are useful only at the level of mechanisms. Declaring a new era merely because algorithms, platforms or models have appeared deprives theory of its ability to distinguish continuity and rupture. The contribution of Intelligence and Spirit is to return broad judgments to identifiable institutional mechanisms. Technological futures are not merely predictive objects. How they are contested must therefore remain answerable to evidence and competing explanations beyond Intelligence and Spirit. Negarestani understands intelligence as a practice of giving reasons, revising commitments and participating in a normative space, not merely solving problems. Intelligence is therefore not monopolized by a biological substrate, but neither can it be equated casually with model performance. Whether machines enter a space of normative reasoning concerns responsibility, conceptual use and self-correction—a more demanding question than whether they resemble humans.]

  9. Hui, Yuk. Recursivity and Contingency. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. (Read: Introduction, pp. 1–28).

    [Note: Hui challenges the assumption of a single modern technological path. Recursivity and contingency make technology a historical practice shaped by different cosmologies, cultures and institutions, rather than linear progress alone. AGI futures need not default to ever greater concentration, power and automation; technical institutions can follow different historical paths. The final session must distinguish actual capability from philosophical possibility. Recursivity and Contingency clarifies causal levels among AI capabilities, industrial hype, philosophical intelligence and political-economic reality. The account in Recursivity and Contingency of these distinctions holds only where the relevant institutional mechanisms can be identified empirically. Recursivity is not a simple celebration of technical autonomy: together with contingency, it reopens technological history's multiple paths. Modern technology is not the only possible organization of the world; different cosmologies and institutional traditions can produce different technical relations. AI's future need not be presumed to follow one path of scaling and concentration. Cosmotechnics further shows that technological diversity is not different cultural labels on identical equipment, but different combinations of technical purposes, conceptions of nature and social orders. Facing global AI infrastructure, this asks a deeper question than product localization: can different societies determine the scale, pace and normative goals of technical development? Technological diversity is first a question of political capacity—whether societies can genuinely determine their own technical institutions, rather than choose cultural styles atop a predetermined global infrastructure.]

  10. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013. (Read: Chapter 1, "Post-Humanism: Life beyond the Self," pp. 13–54).

    [Note: Braidotti distinguishes the posthuman subject from the traditional humanist subject, offering a posthumanism different from transhumanist enhancement. Must technological futures aim for "stronger humans," or can they rethink life, ecology and relational subjectivity? AI is a heterogeneous umbrella term. The Posthuman returns analysis of automation, control, alignment and posthuman subjectivity to evidential limits: without explicable connections among technology, institutions and political consequences, theoretical analogies remain suggestive. The Posthuman must remain distinct from transhumanist enhancement. Rather than stronger humans, it centres the subject's relations with nonhuman life, technology and environment, giving AI futurism an important counterpoint. Braidotti's posthumanism differs fundamentally from technological enhancement. It critiques humanism's claim to universality around an autonomous, rational European male subject, insisting that subjects are always embedded in life, technology and ecology. Posthuman politics thus concerns not more powerful individuals, but redistribution of interdependence and responsibility among humans, nonhuman life, technical systems and environments. Affirmative politics also reminds us that critique cannot stop at exposing humanist exclusions. Relational subjectivity can ground a new ethics: recognize dependence among humans, animals, ecology and technical systems, and redistribute responsibility accordingly. AI futures concern not only capability upgrades, but which lives and environments enter the valuation of technical development.]

  11. Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso, 2015. (Read: Introduction; chapters on full automation, post-work politics, and institutional strategy).

    [Note: Srnicek and Williams place automation within left political strategy rather than technical destiny. Full automation, shorter working hours and universal basic income seek to redirect technical capacity away from capital's profit logic. In the final session, they form a triangle with Land and Bostrom: is automation capital's self-acceleration, a technical risk requiring control, or a condition that political organization can turn into reduced necessary labour? Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work moves the constraints that resources, labour, ecology and organizational history place on AGI futurism from rhetoric to institutional analysis. Inventing the Future situates automation in a post-work institutional imagination: reducing necessary labour becomes emancipatory only alongside changes to income, public services, working time and ownership. Otherwise, identical capabilities can create unemployment risks and stronger management. No automatic passage connects technical potential to political results. Post-work politics also distinguishes reduced working time from eliminating meaningful activity. Some tasks can be automated, but the value of care, education, culture and political participation cannot simply be subsumed under efficiency. The normative aim should be redistributing necessary labour and free time, not treating "no work" as an end in itself. The radical element is considering automation together with social rights. Shorter hours, basic income, public services and workers' bargaining power are all necessary; otherwise capital may absorb productivity gains as profits and unemployment pressures. Technical progress has no inherently emancipatory direction. Only institutions can turn productivity into greater autonomy over time.]

  12. Benjamin, Ruha. Imagination: A Manifesto. W. W. Norton, 2024. (Read: Introduction and chapters on imagination as a site of struggle).

    [Note: Benjamin treats imagination as a political resource, not a soft cultural supplement. Read with Fisher, Kornbluh and AGI futurism, she asks: if firms can shape public visions of the future through product roadmaps, must resistance reclaim the capacity to determine which futures deserve imagination? Posthuman critique must not escape material politics. How technological futures are contested among risk governance, emancipatory imagination and democratic institutions must therefore face evidence and competing explanations beyond Imagination: A Manifesto. Benjamin raises imagination from private mental activity to public political capacity. The future is not a product awaiting delivery by technology companies, but a space contested through narratives, design, institutions and collective action. At the end of the group, this returns posthuman and AGI debates to democracy: who can propose futures, whose experiences enter their design, and which institutions make alternatives practicable? The politics of imagination also includes the capacity to negate existing institutions. Technical governance often limits the future to incremental upgrades of current products and business models; Benjamin insists it can be reconstructed from suppressed experiences, histories and community practices. This openness is the group's ultimate concern: technological futures are objects not only of prediction, but also of institutional creation. Imagination thus connects with institutional practice. Alternative futures must become organizations, public resources and durable rules, or retreat again into branded visions. This politics also connects directly with design. Datasets, roadmaps and policy scenarios imagine "future users" and "normal society"; design is already distributing possibilities. Expanding imagination means including affected groups in defining problems and setting goals, rather than seeking their feedback only after systems are complete.]