Overview

Algorithms are a form of productive power – so how may we conceptualise the newly merged terrains of social life, economy and self in a world of digital platforms? How do multiple self-quantifying practices interact with questions of class, race and gender? This edited collection considers algorithms at work – for what purposes encoded data about behaviour, attitudes, dispositions, relationships and preferences are deployed – and black box control, platform society theory and the formation of subjectivities. It details technological structures and lived experience of algorithms and the operation of platforms in areas such as crypto-finance, production, surveillance, welfare, activism in pandemic times. Finally, it asks if platform cooperativism, collaborative design and neomutualism offer new visions. Even as problems with labour and in society mount, subjectivities and counter subjectivities here produced appear as conscious participants of change and not so much the servants of algorithmic control and dominant platforms.

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9781914386121

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Emiliana Armano, PhD in Labour Studies at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the State University of Milan, Italy. She collaborates in research into informational capitalism, knowledge work, flexibility and precariousness, with a social inquiry and co-research methodological approach. Her recent publications include (with F. Chicchi, E. Fisher and E. Risi), Boundaries and Measurements of Emerging Work: Gratuity, Precariousness and Processes of Subjectivity in the Age of Digital Production (2014). Marco Briziarelli is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico, USA. He studies critical approaches to media and communication theory, especially as these fields intersect with broader issues in political and social theory, intellectual and cultural history. He is also the author of The Red Brigades and the Discourse of Violence: Revolution and Restoration (2014) and co-author of Reviving Gramsci: Crisis, Communication, and Change (2016). Elisabetta Risi, PhD in Information Society, is Research Fellow of the Department of Communication, Arts and Media of IULM University (Milan), Italy. She teaches disciplines related to the critical study of society and media and her research interests includecontemporary forms of job insecurity, and communication practices, identity and social change. Among her recent publications (with E. Armano, F. Chicchi and E. Fisher), is a Special Issue of Sociologia del Lavoro entitled 'Borders and Measures of Emerging Work: Gratuitousness, Precariousness and Processes of Subjectivity in the Era of Digital Production'.

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