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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 collection considers algorithms at work, alongside black box control, platform society theory and the formation of subjectivities.
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Life is increasingly governed by digital and smart technologies, platforms, big data and algorithms. Challenging our increasing dependence on the digital, this book raises provocative and urgent questions: in a world of compulsory digitality, is there an opt out button? Where, when, how, why and to whom is it available? Answering these questions has become even more relevant since the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, the book puts forward the concept of ‘digital disengagement’, explored across six key areas of digitisation: health; citizenship; education; consumer culture; labour; and the environment. As an interdisciplinary piece of work, the book will be useful to any scholar and activist in Digital, Internet and Social Media Studies, Digital Sociology and Social Policy, Digital Health, Media, Popular and Communication Studies, Consumer Culture, and Environment Studies.
Book DetailsThis book offers critical interrogations of AI and its impact in order to offer analysis of what ‘AI for Everyone’ might mean. It is structured in three parts: ‘AI: Humans vs. Machines’, ‘Discourses and Myths About AI’ and ‘AI Power and Inequalities’. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines this book offers a vital intervention on one of the most hyped concepts of our times.
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The Fight Against Platform Capitalism develops a critique of platform capitalism from the perspective of workers and contributes to debates about the future of work, automation and worker organising. As platforms internationalise it presents an alternative portrait focusing on workers’ experience and transnational solidarity.
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The objective of this book is to outline how a radically democratic politics can be reinvigorated in theory and practice through the use of the internet. The author argues that politics in its proper sense can be distinguished from anti-politics by analyzing the configuration of public space, subjectivity, participation, and conflict. Each of these terrains can be configured in a more or less political manner, though the contemporary status quo heavily skews them towards anti-political configuration.
Using this understanding of what exactly politics entails, this book considers how the internet can both help and hinder efforts to move each area in a more political direction. By explicitly interpreting contemporary theories of the political in terms of the internet, this analysis avoids the twin traps of both technological determinism and technological cynicism.
Raising awareness of what the word ‘politics’ means, the author develops theoretical work by Arendt, Rancière, Žižek and Mouffe to present a clear and coherent view of how in theory, politics can be digitized and alternatively how the internet can be deployed in the service of trulydemocratic politics.
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