Vectoral Agents : Power in the Age of Planetary Computation

As machine learning algorithms are delegated with more and more tasks, the capacities that were historically considered signs of human exceptionalism become increasingly less persuasive. Composing a song, making a managerial or moral decision, or providing emotional support can now be outsourced to an algorithmically-powered machine. These operations are based on large-scale statistical aggregations in which pattern recognition is being deployed to manage individuals as pure data points and vectorial movements. As these procedures distribute authority, profit and privilege in ways that often by-pass human subjectivity, they throw into crisis the established ways of comprehending the relation between technology, individuals, and power.

This collected volume brings together authors who engage with the politics of (non) human agency that shape our present moment. Our interrogation proceeds by asking the following questions: how to expand the notion of agency beyond the boundaries of human sovereign action, while still accounting for power relations that remain human, all too human?; how to avoid the stale opposition between a humanist defense of human exceptionalism and the ideological promises of a technological singularity which simply reproduce an anthropocentric account of agency?; how to address the growing role of technology in contemporary society without falling prey to reductive techno-determinist or instrumentalist narratives?; how do our fantasies of control over our technologies and our belief in their neutrality undermine our efforts to organise our societies in more equitable ways?