Document details

Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight Against Platform Power

Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press (2024), xiii, 241 pp.

Contains index

ISBN 978-0-262-37748-5 (pdf); 978-0-262-54742-0 (print)

CC BY-NC-ND

"Drawing from rich ethnographic materials and perspectives from both the Global North and South, authors Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré explore how people appropriate and reconfigure algorithms to pursue their objectives in three domains of everyday life: gig work, cultural industries, and politics. They reveal how forms of algorithmic agency and resistance are endemic and mundane and how the platform society is a contested battleground of contrasting forces. Bonini and Treré begin by outlining their key theoretical framework of moral economies. This framework argues that algorithms exist on a continuum. At its two extremes are two competing moral economies: the user moral economy and the platform moral economy. From here, Algorithms of Resistance chronicles the various inventive ways that individuals can work to achieve agency and resist the ubiquitous power of algorithms." (Publisher description)
Introduction, 1
1 Living with algorithms: power, agency, resistance, 13
2 The moral economy of algorithmic agency, 29
3 Gaming the boss, 59
4 Gaming culture, 107
5 Gaming politics, 131
6 Frontiers of resistance In the automated society, 155
Appendix: research methods, 179