The book explores the relationship between information infrastructures and the knowledge they produce, contrasting values like speed and efficiency with communal and ecological perspectives. It challenges the notion of technical solutions, prompting readers to reconsider societal goals and the purposes of infrastructures. By framing these issues as open questions, it invites a deeper reflection on the implications of how we organize and interact with technology in our lives.
I. The myth of automated autonomy. The fantasy of full automation -- Spotty automation and less-than-human workers -- II. The myth of automation everywhere. Technology in context, technology as culture -- Automation on the ground -- III. The myth of automating everyone. Automation's racialized fallout -- Automation's gendered inequality -- Conclusion : automation is not our future.
Hate is being reinvented. Over the last two decades, online platforms have been used to repackage racist, sexist and xenophobic ideologies into new sociotechnical forms. Digital hate is ancient but novel, deploying the Internet to boost its allure and broaden its appeal. To understand the logic of hate, Luke Munn investigates four objects: 8chan, the cesspool of the Internet, QAnon, the popular meta-conspiracy, Parler, a social media site, and Gab, the »platform for the people.« Drawing together powerful human stories with insights from media studies, psychology, political science, and race and cultural studies, he portrays how digital hate infiltrates hearts and minds.
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 world, the algorithmic must negotiate with frictions—the ‘merely’ technical routines of distributing data and running tasks coming together into broader social forces that shape subjectivities, steer bodies, and calibrate relationships. Driven by the imperatives of capital, the algorithmic exhausts subjects and spaces, a double move seeking to both exhaustively apprehend them and exhaust away their productivities. But these on-the-ground encounters also reveal that force is never guaranteed. The irreducibility of the world renders logic inadequate and control gives way to contingency.