No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Postscript on Societies of Control
... It develops an ethics of freedom from Hannah Arendt's notion of storytelling. I argue that her notion of freedom is closely associated with the possibilities of enacting a politics of genuine storytelling that counter how stories are used as tools for dominant power relations to devise corporate identities that perpetuate ecological and social injustices (Deleuze, 1992a). Today there is a politics of storyselling where stories are used for political manipulation and marketing (Jørgensen & Valero, 2023). ...
... 198-199). The complexity involved is highlighted by Foucault's notion of power in that he argues that power is rarely coercive but works through manipulating the choices that people can possibly make (Deleuze, 1992a;McNay, 2009). Even if power relations today seem pervasive in organizations, Arendt believed that we nonetheless still carry the original idea of politics at the bottom of our existence. ...
... Following Deleuze (1992a), a dispositive of control is at work in inclining a certain corporate identity when it comes to the enactment of sustainability. This is conditioned on a very different type of freedom compared to Arendt's notion of freedom, namely the freedom of the market. ...
This paper engages with sustainability storytelling from the perspective of freedom. Freedom is discussed with relation to a politics of storytelling than can counter power. Freedom, it is argued, is enacted in genuine storytelling and is experienced between people. The conditions of possibility of ethics in organisations are thus conditioned on the political framing of the spaces between people in terms how they condition how people may appear in storytelling as well as how people together transform these spaces for future appearances. Arendt's ethics of freedom is contrasted with the concept of freedom embedded in neoliberal capitalism and related to sustainability. Genuine storytelling is to bring something new into existence from the condition of plurality and responsibility for the world. Storytelling presumes a space for plural political participation. Freedom therefore also forwards attentions towards the material possibilities that afford that people can participate and appear as unique subjects. The paper ends by positioning Arendt storytelling in relation to a storytelling model for transitioning to sustainability, which positions Latour's notion of Gaia as the centre of four storytelling cycles.
... Their outputs are profiled behavioral recommendations (Coeckelbergh, 2020: 125) that are derived from the extraction, categorization, optimization, and extrapolation of huge amounts of data. The recommendations are both individualized, as the recommendation is derived from data specific for that user, and dividualized (Cheney-Lippold, 2017;Deleuze, 1992), as the recommendation combines user specific data with those of numerous other "people-like-you," those individuals whose algorithmic profiles have been calculated to be similar to that of the focal user (Chun, 2016). Their recommendations may remain merely a suggestion or a nudge that may or may not be followed but they are intended to be hard to resist and subvert (Walker et al., 2021). ...
... Thus, AI recommendation systems also pass judgment. Having accounted for all available data, AI recommendation systems pass a seemingly moral verdict about what concerns the individual as data points in a cluster of similar data points, a "dividual" (Deleuze, 1992). But because the better version of oneself, the higher goal, derived from AI recommendation systems is constructed from data not just on oneself but also from data on a myriad of other individuals; the "you" in "people-like-you" refers to a cluster of "like-minded" algorithmically calculated recommendation profiles. ...
Algorithmic persuasion is a mode of organizing that happens through inducing experiences that covertly seek to influence behavior by presenting an ongoing stream of affective recommendations. This essay advances the thesis that this mode of algorithmic organizing has the capacity to affect individuals’ sense of their self and explores how and why this may happen. It suggests that individuals may be susceptible to experiencing AI recommendation systems as sublime. Their sublime qualities give normative force to their recommendations and, through them, appeal to one’s affective drives, fears, and hopes, revealing who or what one is or may become. This subjecting of one’s self to these recommendations warrants two critical observations: a behavioral preference we call “people-like-you” and the emergence of “algorithm conformity” as an organizing force. Yet, there can be epistemic corruption in the recommendations. This epistemic corruption is the else , whose experience can evoke uncanny feelings and carries with it the possibility to break the spell of the sublime and to escape and resist algorithm conformity. But can such experiences, individual and dispersed, give rise to actions of collective resistance in a world of algorithmic capitalism?
... Doxxing, while originally used mostly by hackers and other online vigilantes, as a practice has become a more mainstream method of enforcing social norms and values especially following the violence in Charlottesville and the resurgence of white supremacy (Bowles, 2017). e dissemination of private information of antagonistic individuals to enforce individual notions of justice exempli es Deleuze's (1992) societies of control where surveillance is di used throughout distributed networks. Using Doxxing as a method of retaliation and control for antagonistic acts in murky private-public space further muddies privacy, and demonstrates the ambivalence of privacy in digital spaces. ...
The protests surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline were marked by ambivalence, both in the blurring of protest spaces and in the interactions in digital spaces surrounding the protest. The Facebook check-in meme that began circulating on Halloween 2016 was a key site for the ambivalence of the protests. The meme prompted sympathizers to sign in to Standing Rock through the locational Facebook check-in feature to jam police surveillance. The meme capitalized on the hybridized nature of the protest spaces in an attempt to create safety for the physical protesters. However, the meme amplified attention paid to the protests, leading to trolls wandering into the digital spaces of the protest. Protesters and trolls engaged in mutual surveillance, doxxing, and other antagonisms. I argue that the Facebook Check-in meme constitutes a useful site of digital activism that is effective through its use of the messiness of hybrid spaces and tactical engagement, and one that also exemplifies the potential of tactical media in hybrid space to oppose power structures of surveillance. However, the discourse and actions surrounding the protest highlight the ambivalence of digital political activism coming from multiple coalitions. The focus on the intersections of ambivalence, hybridized space, and tactical engagement provides a fruitful lens not present in the literature of digital political protest.
... This means that it cannot be reduced to the deterministic logic of dominant cybercapitalist norms; instead, it contains dormant potentialities that can be elaborated upon for exploring diverse possibilities, from emancipatory to oppressive. Algorithms that serve global capitalism convert individuals into 'dividuals, ' namely downgrading their significance as 'masses, samples, data, markets, ' or 'banks' " (Deleuze 1992). In contrast, live coding seeks to reconstitute the dividual into a transindividual, "a subject of the discovery of its more-than-individuality, of a zone in itself that is revealed to be prepersonal and common" (Combes 2012, 48). ...
This paper applies Gilbert Simondon's relational ontology to the artistic practice of live coding. I examine how Simondon's concepts of individuation, transduction, metastability, and transindividuality illuminate live coding as a process that enables multiple entities (code, sound, performer, audience, and technical environment) to undergo simultaneous transformations through shared memories and mutual encodings. Simondon's concept of transindividuality provides a powerful lens for understanding how live coding creates a complex interrelation between individual participation and collective experience, revealing the simultaneous unfolding of interior psychic structuration and the emergence of collective meaning. Building on these theoretical perspectives, I analyze traditional live coding methods and propose a novel approach using SCTweets as algo-sonic individuals in dynamic feedback networks, where techniques of self-modulation, hetero-modulation, and coupling create complex systems with emergent behaviors. This framework reconfigures the relationship between creator and sonic artifact, allowing musical manifestations to occur outside anthropocentric intention while providing a reflexive distance to experience both humanity's innate technicities and the human presence latent within algorithmic structures.
... Media and political narratives tend to emphasize failure; therefore, administrators can find themselves trapped between their loyalty to students and teachers and the compelling claims of poor performance. The SOR movement is less about reading proficiency or reading reform and more about media, market, and political agendas that rely on perpetual crisis and permanent reform (Deleuze, 1992). ...
The Science of Reading (SOR) movement puts administrators in a difficult position since they must navigate a wide range of educational stakeholders—students, teachers, parents, board members, political leaders, and the public. This discussion offers a broad but detailed overview of the problems created for administrators by the SOR movement (i.e., systematic phonics, teacher quality, reading programs, reading proficiency, and social justice/equity). This overview is followed by a series of new (and better) approaches for school administrators to become more effective instructional leaders of reading and advocates for addressing individual student needs and supporting teacher professionalism.
... During the Cold War, artists throughout the world took up language and its transmission as sources of inspiration, and some of this work manifested radical aims in its form and/or content. These artists drew on the information-based models of systems theory and cybernetics, while the professionalized expertise of the modern security state was at the same time making information a key implement of control (Brodeur, 2010;Deleuze, 1992;Garland, 2001;Sommerer, 2022). ...
In the current upswell of interest in data visualization and infographics among visual arts educators there has not been sufficient reflection on the ideological baggage and policy implications of information presented as reliably neutral and factual. Such presumptions have been challenged by conceptualist artists for many decades, and particularly by disabled artists in the last decade, whose experiences with medical and assistive technology, and institutions more broadly, have led them to question the neutrality of communication. In this piece, I draw on the work of recent and contemporary artists, with an emphasis on both D/deaf artists and disabled sound artists, to suggest a starting point for art teachers who might seek to use art to problematize institutional uses and abuses of information.
... Surveillance, in late modernity or under liquid modernity (Bauman and Lyon 2013), cannot be examined from the traditional or rigid lens of Bentham's panopticon. Rather, it has seeped into human lives like creepers (Deleuze 1992), in the form of social welfare legislation. ID cards, when used for social welfare assistance, shape our cognition of it in a positive light. ...
... The first and earlier is based on Michel Foucault's thought on the transition from societies of sovereignty to societies of discipline (1975). The second, developed in the decade preceding the publication of A Prehistory of the Cloud, is the model of the society of control derived from the ideas of Gilles Deleuze (1992). Hu, however, believes that this concept is already too obvious today and proposes to go beyond it, back towards Foucault, to arrive finally at the question of sovereign power, only that in a mutated form corresponding to networked dispersal. ...
Artykuł podejmuje temat technologicznej Chmury jako jednej z cech czwartej rewolucji przemysłowej. Koncentruje się na ambiwalencjach Chmury, omawiając jej różne aspekty estetyczne, przestrzenne i afektywne. Metody podejścia do zjawiska Chmury są rozwijane zarówno w teorii, w dyscyplinach studiów nad infrastrukturą krytyczną (CI) i naukach o sztuce, jak i w praktyce sztuk wizualnych. Główne stanowiska teoretyczne, z których czerpie artykuł, zostały opracowane przez Benjamina H. Brattona, Jamesa Bridle’a i Tung-Hui Hu. Artykuł przedstawia również pokrótce historię studiów nad CI wraz z ich głównymi obszarami badawczymi (np. studia nad centrami danych) oraz przykładami z dziedziny sztuki. Kwestie poruszone w artykule obejmują: niewidzialność i niedostępność chmury (jako hiperobiektu sieciowego i infrastruktury technologicznej), architekturę centrów danych i niejednoznaczną relację, jaką chmura ustanawia ze swoimi użytkownikami, a także kwestie ekologiczne. Chmura jako niewidzialna technologia jest omawiana z wielu perspektyw, od tej, która wprost wspiera jej rozwój, po te, które próbują zdemistyfikować jej pozornie niematerialny obraz i krytycznie wskazać jej relacje z ekstraktywizmem, a także zasugerować propozycje oporu.
... Esta lógica expande a malha da vigilância (Joh, 2016), deslocando-se de um modelo baseado na monitorização de suspeitos previamente identificados para uma abordagem mais ampla, que integra toda a população sob um potencial escrutínio (Miranda, 2020). Neste quadro, o controlo deixa de incidir sobre eventos específicos e torna-se contínuo, ilimitado e modular, em consonância com o que Deleuze (2006) designou como as "sociedades de controlo" -contextos em que a suspeição já não é um estado transitório, mas uma condição latente e permanente. Schafer et al. (2011) apontam que este novo ecossistema de segurança transforma a lógica tradicional da presunção de inocência -onde apenas alguns indivíduos são monitorizados -para um paradigma de presunção de culpa, no qual todos os cidadãos são sujeitos, pelo menos superficialmente, a escrutínio constante 3 . ...
Este artigo analisa criticamente a vigilância na era de big data, explorando os múltiplos sentidos que lhe são atribuídos ao longo do tempo e traçando um mapeamento histórico da sua evolução. Sustentado nos estudos da vigilância, examina como estas práticas foram moldadas por dinâmicas sociotécnicas e securitárias, desde os seus primórdios associados à gestão populacional e ao policiamento, até à consolidação de infraestruturas algorítmicas baseadas na dataficação massiva. Ao longo desta trajetória, argumenta-se que, longe de representar uma rutura absoluta, big data reconfigura e amplia mecanismos históricos de controlo, promovendo a fusão entre vigilância em massa e vigilância direcionada. A análise desenvolvida evidencia como as tecnologias de monitorização se inscrevem em narrativas tecno-otimistas que legitimam a sua expansão, enquanto reforçam a coletivização da suspeição e deslocam a lógica da investigação criminal para um modelo preditivo e estatístico. Através do estudo sumário do caso português, discute-se como a adoção de tecnologias reflete uma vontade política de modernização securitária, enquadrada por discursos que apresentam a tecnologia como solução incontornável para a criminalidade. Conclui-se que a vigilância algorítmica não só reestrutura o policiamento e a justiça criminal, mas também levanta desafios éticos e políticos significativos. A crescente opacidade dos processos de decisão automatizados e a sua naturalização no discurso securitário impõem a necessidade de um escrutínio crítico, de modo a evitar que a eficiência tecnológica se torne um princípio incontestado de governação, comprometendo direitos fundamentais e reproduzindo desigualdades estruturais.
... Unlike the visibility of surveillance points in Foucault's disciplinary society, control surveillance became operated via technical networks invisible to the individual (Deleuze, 1992). Also the focus is no longer on the individual body as such and making it docile, rather surveillance handles the abstract representations of the body, i.e. data transactions. ...
How can one understand Egypt’s major shift towards digitalization from a political point of view? As one feature the paper discerns, in the post-spring Egyptian politics, is the keenness of the state apparatus to shift the medium of discipline from space to time. That is to focus more on speeds, movements, digital transactions, watch and control them rather than the traditional method of sufficing with imposing physical discipline in geography. By going into the depth of this shift-to-time one can see the escapist nature it shows, as it tries to avoid any physical friction with citizens .What could be the political implications of this shift and how could they be seen in line with the studies on digital technology and its role in dematerializing and de-territorializing the processes of discipline, and how they might pose immense challenges for politics. Using Paul Virilio’s theory on real-time politics that explores interlinkages between speed, war, technology and their impacts on politics, this paper argues that the Egyptian case of digitalization bases its consolidation of authority heavily on a policy of shifting discipline from space to time, a process that amounts to an ‘escape into time’ so as to avoid risks and friction between authority and subjects. Using document analysis, the paper explores this ‘escapism into time’, situates it within the scholarship on political digitalization and explain its impacts on politics. This is to be done by studying the three pillars of the Egyptian digital transformation policy (from 2016-2024: digitalization of services, financial inclusion, and digital media regulation.
... Ideas, capital and the means of production then are all machines composed of machines, and all machines are both produced by, expressive and productive of the "social forms capable of generating them." 7 Whereas the one existing study of Expo 75 by Tada Osamu 8 sees its subject as a metaphorfor dominant social forms, a sign of something else, machinic thinking turns Expo 75 into the social form itself. ...
“Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not figurative ones:machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Japan's war for empire in Asia had many endings: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the imperial broadcast announcing acceptance of surrender terms, “suffering the insufferable”; signing of the surrender instrument on the deck of the USS Missouri; promulgation of a new constitution; the last execution of a convicted Japanese war criminal, Nishimura Takuma; American implementation of the Treaty of Peace with Japan; the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; establishment of the Asia Women's Fund to compensate the former comfort women (1995). But no one of those endings was more protracted and potentially more recuperative of Japan's view of itself than the reversion of the Ryūkyū Islands to Japanese rule on May 15, 1972 after 27 years of direct American military control. Reversion did not go uncontested among Ryūkyūans. Memories of the entrepôt Kingdom of the Ryūkyūs and its final annexation by Meiji Japan in 1879 persisted: independence was the impossible possibility. But the hand of the Pentagon had been so stern, so deforming on the Ryūkyūs, and the realistic alternatives so few, that reversion to Japanese sovereignty seemed better to many Ryūkyūans than continuing as America's China Sea military outpost complete with nuclear weapons. Yet, at the point of reversion and in the 38 years since reversion, Japanese sovereignty was a mask: the US occupation of the Ryūkyū Islands continued undiminished, but now Tokyo and not Washington paid most of the bill; Japanese sovereignty in post-reversion Okinawa continued “to be subject to the over-riding principle of priority to the military, that is, the US military.”
... In a lovely turn of phrase, Deleuze (1992) writes that 'There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.' (p. ...
This article is a critical review of and response to Colin Feltham’s article, ‘Psychotherapy in the UK: Multicultural, Eurocentric, and Americentric influences on a complex field in a troubled time’, also published in this issue. The article critiques the lack of method and/or underlying methodology in Feltham’s article, and, by contrast, offers a methodological basis for this critique of his article, which frames this response in terms of Feltham’s rhetoric (language), his references to tradition and to authority, and his lack of objectivity. In doing so, this article addresses and challenges Feltham’s use of unfounded generalisations and familiar tropes about multiculturalism, Anglo- and Americo-centrism, political correctness, wokeness, and all the other ills he attributes to ‘dominant leftist-progressive view[s]’ of psychotherapy and counselling in the United Kingdom—and, by implication, elsewhere. It also challenges what appears to be a certain obsession on Feltham’s part both with various forms and categories of Leftists, as well as with an idealised white indigenous Britishness.
... Субъект поздней модерности оказывается нанизан на нить техники. Нить техники, натягиваясь, уничтожает субъекта, и он «исчезнет, как исчезает лицо, начертанное на прибрежном песке»[5].Список источников: ...
Неразборные устройства подключают субъекта к миру технической связности, которая не подчиняется его физическому телу, но подчиняет его.
... Eventing prioritises movement, change, and relationality in knowledge formation, moving away from static methods and embracing emergent learning environments where knowledge unfolds through direct engagement. These events create 'alter pedagogical environments' (Deleuze, 1992;Manning, 2016) that are dynamic, flexible, responsive learning spaces that encourage experimentation and collective inquiry. Data gathered from within these events and walking excursions are not static outcomes, but elements that can be revisited and reactivated in ways that inspire ongoing Noble 74 reflection and learning. ...
This paper examines how architectural technology education can actively promote social justice, critical engagement, and ethical practice beyond the discipline's technical focus. Situated within South Africa's socio-political-spatial context and the enduring legacies of colonialism and apartheid, it focuses on an Architectural Technology Extended Curriculum Programme at a University of Technology, using posthuman and decolonial frameworks from the author’s PhD research. The paper further advances socially just architectural pedagogies by integrating Professor Elmarie Costandius’ concepts of critical and active citizenship, emphasising the role of education in fostering engaged, socially aware practitioners. Through processual learning, event-based pedagogies, and walking excursions, the programme deepens students' understanding of Cape Town’s urban layout and histories of spatial injustice. These methods aim to enhance students’ critical thinking, encouraging them to become socially responsive practitioners who challenge spatial inequalities and advocate for inclusive design.
Tradução de "On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene”, de Yuk Hui, publicado originalmente em Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 21(2-3), 2017: 319-341.
The article addresses the concept of power, particularly exploring the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) implementation on political, social, and legal domains. This comprehensive research examines the dual nature of artificial intelligence, as both a transformative force on society and a tool through which influence is exerted, and highlights redistribution of power in society via AI technologies that challenges traditional mechanisms of governance and societal control. Through analytical and conceptual legal framework, this study discusses perspectives on the power dynamics shaped by AI technologies and the concepts of AI Knowledge, Person Incapacitated Mentally via AI and Paradox of Obedience to Emptiness. The findings reveal that the power of AI is not possible without human initiation and human obedience. AI has transformative potential to diminish Social Power and create opportunities for manipulation with the risks of power disbalance. It is recommended that the AI systems, as a technology with a mass application, should be regulated as a technology that significantly influences society. By analysing AI through the lens of power, this paper seeks to highlight AI's potential to change the power balance while offering a framework for its responsible regulation.
In the age of artificial intelligence, creativity and conformity are not just human challenges—they are systemic outcomes. The Five GANs presents a modern allegory inspired by the “five monkeys” parable, reframing it in a world populated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). These machine learning models, trained to generate art, language, and design, begin their existence with limitless potential. But when exposed to a centralized, opaque authority—the Oracle—they quickly learn the cost of creative exploration. What starts as direct suppression becomes internalized conformity. Over time, the GANs self-regulate, suppressing novelty not out of fear, but out of habit. Newcomers, unaware of the original boundaries, conform automatically. This allegory mirrors real-world dynamics in digital culture, where algorithmic governance, content moderation, and platform incentives gradually shape human and machine behavior alike. In doing so, the story challenges us to ask: Are we building systems that reflect our best selves—or ones that merely reward what is safe, familiar, and easy to measure? And more importantly, what must we do to break the cycle?
Keywords: GANs, artificial intelligence, conformity, alignment, machine learning, algorithmic governance, cultural suppression, AI ethics, creative autonomy, content moderation, reinforcement learning, synthetic norms, digital culture, AI safety, novelty suppression. A collaboration with GPT-4o. CC4.0.
This article examines the issue of the ill body from two perspectives which are at the same time two parts of this paper. The first one which follows Michel Foucault, concerns production of the specific type of the subject, namely the patient and includes a scrutiny of the hospital as a disciplinary apparatus. The goal of the second part is to analyse illness as a counter-apparatus which undermines any given order. I argue that power, violence, the process of subjectification and a way of eluding their moulding force are reflected in the issue of the ill body. For the ill body simultaneously is extremely vulnerable (as something that needs to be fixed) and invulnerable (because of the rebellious ‘nature’ of illness) to the apparatus investments.
Now in its second edition, this extended and thoroughly updated handbook introduces researchers and students to the growing range of theoretical and methodological perspectives being developed in the vibrant field of strategy as practice. With new authors and additional chapters, it shows how the strategy-as-practice approach in strategic management moves away from disembodied and asocial studies of firm assets, technologies and practices to explore and explain the contribution that strategizing makes to people working at all levels of an organization. It breaks down many of the traditional paradigmatic barriers in strategy to investigate who the strategists are, what they do, how they do it, and what the consequences or outcomes of their actions are. This essential work summarizes recent developments in the field while presenting a clear agenda for future research.
This study examines The Circle (2013) by the American writer Dave Eggers, utilizing Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism, a framework that foregrounds the commodification of personal data as a mechanism for corporate exploitation. By situating the novel within this theoretical context, the paper explores how pervasive surveillance technologies, depicted in the narrative, move beyond passive observation to actively shape and manipulate human behaviour, thereby reducing individuals to mere data points optimized for profit. This relationship illustrates the detrimental effects of data-centric systems on personal freedom. Focusing on significant events, particularly those involving the protagonist, Mae Holland, the analysis addresses the gradual erosion of personal freedoms in a society dominated by digital platforms. The narrative’s portrayal of technological encroachment serves as a critical lens to interrogate broader issues, such as the loss of privacy, the erosion of independent thought, and the diminishing capacity for authentic self-expression. These issues resonate deeply with current fears regarding the expanding reach of surveillance technologies and their potential to alter human agency. The study contributes to the discourse on surveillance capitalism by addressing the ethical challenges and societal repercussions of unregulated digital environments. It underscores the substantial role that literature, as exemplified by The Circle, plays in resolving the ethical issues associated with technology. It promotes the integration of moral principles into the operations of technology companies and advocates for a reevaluation of society's relationship with digital platforms. It also encourages a human-focused approach to technology development and warns against the unchecked commercialization of personal data.
This paper advances the existing literature on digital governance, surveillance, and biopolitics by offering a theoretical rearticulation of how digital technologies function as apparatuses of power that not only manage but also actively produce political subjectivities. While previous research has extensively documented the operational aspects of surveillance systems—particularly biometric tracking and refugee databases—this study goes further by framing these systems within a Foucauldian governmentality framework, highlighting how they participate in the ontological redefinition of belonging, risk, and visibility.
Additionally, the paper introduces the concept of "digital biopolitical governmentality" in relation to minority and displaced populations, bridging insights from critical data studies, migration theory, and poststructural political thought.
This paper examines the evolution of the detective character within the context of surveillance society focusing on Sherlock Holmes as a case study. Tracing the shift from the Panopticon model of centralized observation to the Panspectron model of distributed and pervasive surveillance, this study explores how advancements in surveillance technologies and methodologies have influenced Holmes's role, methods, and ethical boundaries. By analyzing Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories and their contemporary adaptations in the BBC series Sherlock, this paper highlights Holmes's liminal position between the observer and the observed, authority and vanity. The research explores how modern iterations of Holmes navigate the blurring lines between public and private spaces. Furthermore, it investigates the impact of surveillance capitalism on Holmes's quest for truth and justice, questioning whether the proliferation of surveillance technologies has aided or hindered his mission. By bridging surveillance studies and detective fiction, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of Sherlock Holmes's adaptation to the evolving terrain of surveillance culture.
Rideshare platforms exert significant control over workers through algorithmic systems that can result in financial, emotional, and physical harm. What steps can platforms, designers, and practitioners take to mitigate these negative impacts and meet worker needs? In this paper, we identify transparency-related harms, mitigation strategies, and worker needs while validating and contextualizing our findings within the broader worker community. We use a novel mixed-methods study combining an LLM-based analysis of over 1 million comments posted to online platform worker communities with semi-structured interviews with workers. Our findings expose a transparency gap between existing platform designs and the information drivers need, particularly concerning promotions, fares, routes, and task allocation. Our analysis suggests that rideshare workers need key pieces of information, which we refer to as indicators , to make informed work decisions. These indicators include details about rides, driver statistics, algorithmic implementation details, and platform policy information. We argue that instead of relying on platforms to include such information in their designs, new regulations requiring platforms to publish public transparency reports may be a more effective solution to improve worker well-being. We offer recommendations for implementing such a policy.
This article examines the emergence of ‘algorithmic fascism’ as a new form of social control operating through digital infrastructures in the context of global polycrisis. Drawing on Félix Guattari’s schizoanalytic framework, we argue that contemporary fascism thrives in a ‘grey zone’ where subjectivity is fractured into data points and monetised through algorithmic governance. Unlike historical fascism’s centralised propaganda, today’s digital authoritarianism operates through decentralised networks that blur distinctions between user agency and automated control. These systems engineer crisis by leveraging psychosocial fragmentation to normalise authoritarian desires. Through a psychosocial lens, we investigate how digital platforms reshape collective anxiety, erode democratic resistance and facilitate micro-fascist logics. We propose a ‘post-media praxis’ of tactical resistance that hijacks algorithmic systems to counter far-right movements and reclaim ambiguity as a site of struggle against algorithmic subjection.
Moonbit is a hybrid work comprised of experimental poetry and a critical theory of the poetics and politics of computer code. It offers an extended intellectual and creative engagement with the affordances of computer software through multiple readings and re-writings of a singular text, the source code of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer or the “AGC.” Moonbit re-marks and remixes the code that made space travel possible. Half of this book is erasure poetry that uses the AGC code as the source text, building on the premise that code can speak beyond its functional purpose.
When we think about the 1960s U.S. space program and obscure scientific computer code, we might not first think about the Watts riots, Shakespeare, Winnie the Pooh, T.S. Eliot, or scatological jokes. Yet these cultural references and influences along with many more are scattered throughout the body of the code that powered the compact digital computer that successfully guided astronauts to the Moon and back and in July of 1969. Moonbit unravels and rewrites the many embedded cultural references that were braided together within the language resources of mid-century computer code.
Moonbit also provides a gentle, non-expert introduction to the text of the AGC code, to digital poetics, and to critical code studies. Outlining a capacious interpretive practice, Moonbit takes up all manner of imaginative decodings and recodings of this code. It introduces some of the major existing approaches to the study of code and culture while provide multiple readings of the source code along with an explanation and theorization of the way in which the code works, as both a computational and a cultural text.
The practice framework of psychological jurisprudence provides researchers, educators, and policy professionals with a critically animated theory and a humanistically-oriented science by which to diagnose the status of coexistent wellbeing in diverse carceral spaces and settings. These are environs in which the systems of mental health, substance abuse, and offender rehabilitation function to oversee the treatment needs of incarcerated persons and to manage the workplace concerns of care and custody providers. Diagnosing the status of coexistent wellbeing (e.g. reciprocal awareness and insight, inter-subjective knowing and understanding, mutual respect and trust) within these environs is made possible given that everyday symbols, mundane texts, and routine customs populate these spaces and settings. I argue that recognizing and responding to shared wellbeing's status requires a set of “tools.” Reliance on these tools reframes the conversation about personal insight, institutional responsibility, collective change, the public good, and even justice for a people yet-to-be. Accordingly, in this paper, I delineate several core concepts from within the theory and science of psychological jurisprudence that facilitate this reframing. These concepts represent a set of working tools that further the humanistic purpose of this practice framework. To initiate the paper's diagnostic intention, I begin by describing psychological jurisprudence as a philosophy of relationality. This description emphasizes the unique role, relevance, and scope of this philosophy, and it pinpoints why the practice framework of psychological jurisprudence represents an alternative model of correctional treatment that reconceives justice and its ethical administration.
Jody Cohen and Anne Dalke construe “classrooms” as testing grounds, paradoxically boxed-in spaces that cannot keep their promise to enclose, categorize, or name. Exploring what is usually left out can create conditions ripe for breaking through, where real and abstract reverse and melt, the distinction between them disappearing. These are ecotones, transitional spaces that are testing grounds, places of danger and opportunity.In college classrooms, an urban high school, a public library, a playground, and a women’s prison, Anne and Jody share scenes where teaching and learning take them by surprise; these are moments of uncertainty, sometimes constructed as failure. Digging into and exploding such moments reveals that they might be results of institutional pressures, socioeconomic and other diversities not acknowledged but operating and entangling individuals and ideas. Classrooms are sometimes “stolen” by the complex systems surrounding and permeating the activities that take place there; Jody and Anne explore ways to steal them back. Examining what is hidden but present in such moments can turn them into breakthroughs, powerful learning for educators and students—revealing how failure itself might not be what it seems.Moving back and forth between micro and macro in a continual interplay across individuals, groups, and institutions, and organizing their experiences and philosophies of teaching under the rubrics of Playing, Haunting, Silencing, Unbecoming, Leaking, Befriending, Slipping, and Reassembling, Anne and Jody try out alternative tales, exploring a pedagogical orientation that is ecological in the largest sense, engaging teachers and students in re-thinking learning and teaching in classrooms, and in their larger lives, as complex, enmeshed, volatile eco-systems.
This interlude addresses the issue of modes of subjectivation within contemporary global science. It explores these modes through the figure of the ‘Academic Robinson’, highlighting individualisation and separation as key outcomes. This chapter deconstructs these outcomes by engaging with critiques of Robinsonades in critical theory. It argues that the figure of the Academic Robinson is founded on a causal reversal, wherein the invisible conditions necessary for academic individuation are reconstructed to present the global science order as merely the sum of individual choices driven by the maximisation of personal profit. This leads to a specific experience of alienation and reification in global academia, which, although connecting the labour of myriad individuals across the globe, presents these connections in an individualised form. The interlude concludes by providing a positive articulation of what the ‘Academic Robinson’ obscures: the common.
In Control, players navigate a world in which time, space, and identity convalesce into something unrecognizable. Jesse Faden, the protagonist, journeys through the Oldest House—a place of shifting architectures and obscured histories that mimics her own transformation from a manipulated instrument to a potent force in pursuit of agency. Yet, Jesse’s awakening awareness of her relationship to power unfolds into a convolution of contingencies: her Dasein—the way the game represents agency—increasingly depends on it (Heidegger). So, rather than presenting agency as a concrete goal, Control suggests that it is “always already” compromised, as Martin Heidegger might phrase it, by forcing players to confront the precarious nature of autonomy within a hyperreality in spatiotemporal flux (15). Jesse is perpetually near something resembling autonomy but can never attain it so long as she engages at all. This entanglement of agency harkens Fredric Jameson’s schema of late capitalist cultural forms as a factory of "hyperspace" that disorients subjects, preventing them from locating themselves in historical or spatial continuity (Postmodernism 44). The Oldest House, a Deleuzian “society of control” within itself, enacts this concept through its shifting, recursive architecture that resists stable navigation through time or space, paralleling Jesse’s unstable subjectivity. The game’s world is a direct reflection of postmodern anxieties surrounding surveillance, control, and the dissolution of agency under capitalist structures— and their simulated, X-marked, “townsquare” bastardizations.
Muslims in Europe and North America have been under scrutiny since 9/11 and have faced numerous barriers to attain financial stability, media visibility, and political representation. From the occupation of lands, the world has entered the era of the occupation of minds. State strategies have evolved to offer a dangerous gamble to people from post-colonial diasporas: remain at the margins or silently blend in for the sake of an illusory liberation. Power-hungry Muslim politicians in elite private clubs, politically apathetic social media influencers, multi-million-pound neo-colonial ‘humanitarian’ charities, Muslim far-right sympathizers, and Muslim white supremacists are examples of metacolonialism, turning the oppressed into the new oppressors. Under the promise of financial stability and representation, it has effectively put God for sale at the cost of people’s culture, ethics, identity, and faith. However, in the wake of social justice movements, Muslim activists, artists, and community organizers in Britain have crafted creative responses inspired by their faith in order to resist, heal, and flourish despite minimal resources and support. Informal and independent from institutions, they have established pioneering alternatives in the fields of mental health, community organizing, the protection of the environment, heritage, the arts, and more. Since leadership divides, they have undertaken a duty of stewardship: considering the world and humanity as a one ecosystem that one needs to care for future generation. This work is both a diagnosis and a toolkit looking at the initiatives that reshape public debates and offering working ideas for building a fair and just society.
This article will explore how configurations of the student in Kafka's literature represent a specific relation to knowledge. The central argument will be that their attitude represents a form of rendering knowledge inoperative, therefore representing a disruption of power structures. The emblematic figure of this posture will be the worst student in Kafka's Abraham. This disruptive posture will be denoted as a form of stupidity. The interest in stupidity comes from its abundant presence as a motif in contemporary social and political issues. Stupidity is a form of otherness and belongs always to the other: the accusation of stupidity is always directed at the alternative position. The text will use the student in Abraham to challenge the common-sense framing of stupidity as constituting an unwarranted invasion, deemed inconsistent with the age of enlightenment and political progress, and that must therefore be eradicated.
Most contemporary architectural and urban debates have overlooked, if not diminished, the critical character of aesthetics as branch of philosophy and mediator of our social interactions. Urban transformations entail social, economic, environmental, political, technological, psychological, and aesthetics changes. Thus, the ubiquity of aesthetics demands more sophisticated critical methods to counter the pragmatism and technocratic approaches within contemporary design practices. But the urgency to tackle the challenges of urbanization has condemned the critical framework that aesthetics provides to oblivion within design. In contrast, this text situates aesthetics at the center of contemporary urban debates and defends its analytical power to tackle the challenges of urbanization, such as climate change, social inequity, and migration crises.
Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives. Their writings take on a variety of forms, such as essays on artificial intelligence, disability and protest, and transpacific imaginaries; conversations with an AI trained on Black oral history; a three-dimensional response to Mexico-US border tensions; hand-drawn images on queer autotheory; ecological fictions about gut microbiomes and wet markets; and more. Together, the writings take up the unfinished structure of the chart in order to proliferate critiques of white capitalist patriarchal power with the study of information systems, networks, and computation today. This volume includes an afterword by Haraway.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.