How is life mapped, analyzed, and regulated through the algorithmic? This text investigates a particular algorithmic object—Palantir Gotham, a platform promising to uncover insights from vast amounts of information. Developed initially for intelligence and military organizations, the platform has been rapidly adopted by an array of law e…[Read more]

As the ‘voice with a smile’, the telephone operator was the human interface for a complex telecommunications infrastructure, recalling voices, conversing with customers, and carrying out requests. Such service had to combine cognitive and affective labor in a way that felt natural. Drawing on workers memoirs, training manuals, and managerial rhe…[Read more]

The rise of the alt-right as a potent and sometimes violent political force has been well documented. Yet the journey of an individual towards upholding these ideologies is less well understood. Alt-righters are not instantly converted, but rather incrementally nudged along a particular medial pathway. Drawing on video testimonies, chat logs, and…[Read more]

Uber’s programme of planetary expansion rapidly captures users and integrates cities. Like other platforms, Uber privileges growth at all costs in order to spin up a set of self-reinforcing dynamics like virtuous cycles and network effects. However, drawing on Arrighi, Hobson, and Arendt, Uber can also be understood as a contemporary incarnation o…[Read more]

The alt-right has recently achieved a kind of intellectual legitimacy, with best- selling books, lecture tours, and academics who splice racist ideals into sophisticated new ideologies with pseudoscientific rhetoric. Yet the alt-right also contains a strong anti-intellectual tradition, a populist demagoguery that rails against the doctored version…[Read more]

The interface, Francois Dagognet wrote, is a “fertile nexus.” Rather than an immaterial surface or an impartial gateway, the interface itself continually draws upon political, social and cultural sources, all which work to encourage particular productivities while suppressing or negating others. This article explores the specific properties of Ama…[Read more]

Today the algorithmic moves off the white- board and into the world, producing subjectivities, articulating relationships, and shaping behaviours. Yet to obtain its objectives, the algorithmic must draw upon bodies, flows, and materials — matter which is contentious and agents which have their own intentionalities. Efficacy cannot simply be a…[Read more]

Contemporary power manifests in the algorithmic. And yet this power seems incomprehensible: understood as code, it becomes apolitical; understood as a totality, it becomes overwhelming. This book takes an alternate approach, using it to unravel the operations of Uber and Palantir, Airbnb and Amazon Alexa. Moving off the whiteboard and into the…[Read more]

If the internet was once viewed as a borderless realm, critics now warn it is in danger of being “balkanized”, splintering into nationalized fragments. Certainly nation-states increasingly see the Internet as “their” internet, a national space to be regulated and actively shaped. The first half of this article charts the technologies that appear…[Read more]

From self-driving cars to smart city sensors, billions of devices will be connected to networks in the next few years. These devices will collect vast amounts of data which needs to be processed in real-time, overwhelming centralized cloud ar- chitectures. To address this need, the industry seeks to process data closer to the source, driving a…[Read more]

Hate speech and toxic communication online is on the rise. Responses to this issue tend to offer technical (automated) or non-technical (human content moderation) solutions, or see hate speech as a natural product of hateful people. In contrast, this article begins by recognizing platforms as designed environments that support particular practices…[Read more]

This paper examines how informational processing drove new structures of racial classification in the Third Reich. The Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH (Dehomag) worked closely with the government in designing and integrating punch-card informational systems. As a German subsidiary of IBM, Dehomag’s technology was deployed initially f…[Read more]