The World Algorithm
Knowledge and Power in the New Global Order
Symposium, 2-3 February 2026, Venice
Symposium
The symposium invites international scholars to examine why and how the current economic and geopolitical crisis has unfolded, focusing on the role of technological monopolies and in particular AI in a global scenario marked by trends of de-industrialisation and stagnation. On one level, we have witnessed the rise of global monopolies of knowledge extractivism and AI that threaten labour market, democratic order, and geopolitical equilibria between East and West. Some authors have attempted to capture this shift through the controversial thesis of ‘technofeudalism’ which represents, however, a largely Western perspective. What is certainly needed is an analysis of the new composition of labour (such as microwork) in relation to the global role of technological rent in the present crisis.
On another level, however, it is necessary to interrogate whether these new technological monopolies (including AI) contribute to a crisis of valorisation rather than to productivity. Seeking an exit from the crisis, Silicon Valley companies have forged new alliances with authoritarian politics and have even enlisted AI models as battlegrounds of new cultural wars — a stark contradiction of their liberal rhetoric of the 1990s. The vector of the crisis appears increasingly politicised. In many parts of the world, it has been colonised first by austerity and later by authoritarianism, and has been turned into war in order to obscure its economic origins. Ultimately, the rise of authoritarian politics in Silicon Valley and beyond calls into question the narrative of neoliberalism as a liberation from the political.
Organised by ERC project AIMODELS and the Centre of Critical Theory and Politics (CCTP), Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
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Symposium flyer | 614 KB |
Call
Scholars are invited to submit an abstract (max. 500 words) and a biography (max 100 words) to worldalgorithm@unive.it by 15 December 2025.
The symposium welcomes contributions that explore the interconnection between knowledge and power in the new global order. Possible approaches include long-wave and world-system theories, theories of knowledge rent and intellectual monopoly, infrastructure studies, history of ideas, historical epistemology of science and technology, and critical AI studies along and beyond the following topics:
- Technological rent and the analysis of knowledge economy, intellectual property regimes, and AI monopolies.
- Role of new subjectivities and social antagonism in current technological and economic cycles; intersections of economic, ecological, and political dynamics.
- Knowledge extractivism and its global pipeline, historical continuities, and colonial foundations; comparisons between cognitive and platform capitalism.
- Economies of data analytics in the rise of platform capitalism and AI monopolies; machine learning and datacenters as infrastructures of information surplus.
- Metrology of labour and intelligence: from psychometrics and IQ testing to datafication and algorithmic management.
- Labour composition in the platform economy: ghost work, microwork, and the politics of faux-automation in AI.
- Models of crisis in the knowledge economy; the notion of model collapse in technological and political-economic history.
- New emancipatory cultures of knowledge production, collective intelligence, and algorithmic resistance.
- New authoritarian cultures, fascism, and the war mentality in the age of global monopolies; the role of generative AI in propaganda and manipulation.
- Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 2010.
- Arrighi, Giovanni and Beverly Silver. Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
- Arrighi, Giovanni, Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins. Anti-Systemic Movements. London: Verso, 2020.
- Aston, Trevor Henry and C. H. E. Philpin. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
- Birch, Kean. Technoscience Rent: Toward a Theory of Rentiership for Technoscientific Capitalism. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(1), 2020: 3–33.
- Chamayou, Grégoire. La société ingouvernable: Une généalogie du libéralisme autoritaire [FRA]. Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2018.
- Chamayou, Grégoire. The Birth of Thermopolitics: Wet-Bulb Temperatures, Industrial Microclimates, and Class Struggle in the Early 20th Century. Social Studies of Science, 0(0), 2025.
- Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso, 2016.
- Dean, Jody. Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso: London, 2025.
- Durand, Cédric. Techno-féodalisme: critique de l’économie numérique [FRA]. Paris: Zones, 2023.
- Foley, Duncan. Rethinking Financial Capitalism and the “Information” Economy. Review of Radical Political Economics, 45(3), 2013: 257–268.
- Fourcade, Marion and Kieran Healy. The Ordinal Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024.
- Harris, Malcolm. Palo Alto: a History of California, Capitalism, and the World. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024.
- Kula, Witold. An Economic Theory of the Feudal System : Towards a Model of the Polish Economy 1500-1800. London: Verso, 1987.
- Malm, Andreas. Long Waves of Fossil Development: Periodizing Energy and Capital. Mediations 31 (2), 2018: 17–40.
- Mandel, Ernest. Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A Marxist Interpretation. London: Verso, 1995.
- Muldoon, James, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant. Feeding the Machine : The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I.. New York: Bloomsbury, 2024.
- Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
- Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. The Rest and the West : Capital and Power in a Multipolar World. London: Verso, 2024.
- Paci, Bernardo. A Materialist Conception of Knowledge. The Colonial Roots of Cognitive Capitalism. Milano: Mimesis International, 2025.
- Pagano, Ugo. The Crisis of Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 38(6), 2014: 1409–1429.
- Panofsky, Aaron. Misbehaving Science : Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
- Rikap, Cecilia. Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered. London: Routledge, 2021.
- Silver, Beverly. Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Slobodian, Quinn. Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy. London: Penguin, 2024.
- Slobodian, Quinn. Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the far Right. New York: Zone Books, 2025.
- Tarnoff, Ben and Moira Weigel. Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do--and How They Do It. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
- Treré, Emiliano, and Tiziano Bonini. Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2024.
- Vercellone, Carlo. The Crisis of the Law of Value and the Becoming-Rent of Profit. In Crisis in the Global Economy. Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 85-119.
- Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
- Weigel, Moira. Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School. Boundary 2, 2020.
Programme
The event remains open to all, but registration is required.
Venue: Ca' Dolfin (Trentin Hall), Dorsoduro 3859/A, 30123 Venice (Italy).
Book of abstracts
Session I - Chair: Matteo Pasquinelli
- 09:30-09:55 Tommaso Guariento and Giorgio Ciani (Ca' Foscari - AIMODELS) AI Epistemology in the New Global Order
- 09:55-10:15 Giovanni Fava and Matteo Pasquinelli (Ca' Foscari - AIMODELS) Which World Model? Technosphere and Infosphere in the Long Wave Theory
- 10:15-11:00 Keynote: Grégoire Chamayou (CNRS Paris)
The Prehistory of Data Center Cooling: A Look Back at the Thermal Contradictions of Industrial Production
11:00-11:15 Coffee break
Session II - Chair: Matteo Pasquinelli
- 11:15-12:00 Keynote: Ben Tarnoff (independent scholar) From Fordism to Muskism: A Reactionary Futurism for a Deglobalizing Age
- 12:00-12:45 Keynote: Moira Weigel (Harvard University)
Zero to One Hundred | 从零到一百: Nietzsche, Thiel, and China - 12:45-13:00 Discussion
13:00-14:30 Lunch at venue
Session III - Chair: Giovanni Fava
- 14:30-14:55 Esther Oluffa Pedersen (Roskilde University) Thiel’s Lectures on Anti-Christ: Myth Making and Politics in the Silicon Valley
- 14:55-15:20 Brett Neilson (Western Sydney University)
Fictions of AI Sovereignty: Johor, the VOC, and Nvidia - 15:20-15:45 Eleni Papagiannaki (Edinburgh Napier University)
A Marxist Critique of Mainstream Theories on Labour's Exposure to AI - 15:45-16:00 Discussion
16:00-16:15 Coffee break
Session IV - Chair: Bernardo Paci
- 16:15-16:35 Felicia Jing (Johns Hopkins University)
The Concept of an Algorithm: New Robinsonades in Computer Science - 16:35-16:55 Gabriele de Seta (University of Bergen)
Algorithmic Folklore - 16:55-17:15 Alexandra Deem (Ca' Foscari - MSCA)
Auto-Maga: LLMs as Anti-Woke Meme Machines - 17:15-17:35 Annemarie Witschas (Osnabrück University)
Scale, Expand, Accelerate: AI Narratives Reinforcing the Growth Paradigm - 17:35-18:00 Jonnie Penn (Cambridge University)
Strategic Decomputerisation: On Attensity, Rest, and Metabolic AI - 18:00-18:30 Discussion
19:00 Social dinner (free participation)
Session V - Chair: Tommaso Guariento
- 09:30-10:15 Giorgio Cesarale (Ca' Foscari/CCTP)
Technofeudal Mode of Production and Rent (after Kula) - 10:15-11:00 Keynote: Cédric Durand (University of Geneva)
Overaccumulating AI: rationale, faultlines, and politics - 11:00-11:45 Keynote: Cecilia Rikap (University College London)
Corporate power, intellectual monopolisation and geopolitics in AI times - 11:45-12:00 Discussion
12:00-12.15 Coffee break
Session VI - Chair: Elisabetta Magnani (Macquarie University)
- 12:15-12:30 Hannah Bensussan (University Sorbonne Paris Nord)
Vampire or Parasite? The Unstable Characterisation of Production Relations in Digital Capitalism - 12:30-12:45 Leonie Hunter (Princeton University)
The Automated Fetish: Machine Learning in the Credit System - 12:45-13:00 Alessandro Delfanti and Nicholas Fazio (University of Toronto) The Tech Unconscious: Patents and Capital's Desire
13:00-14.30 Lunch at venue
Session VII - Chair: Emanuele Lepore
- 14:30-14:50 Roberto Nigro (Leuphana University)
Post-Fordism and neo-liberal governmentality - 14:50-15:10 Ivan Bouchardeau (Toulouse University)
Two Schemes for Thinking Knowledge Extractivism - 15:10-15:30 Gary Smith (Zhejiang University)
Recommendation Algorithms and Societal-Scale Epistemic Injustice - 15:30-15:50 Magnus Green (Istituto Fiorentino di Critica Culturale)
The Algorithm as Police of the Possible: Pre-emptive Subjectivity and Authoritarian Desire in the Age of AI Monopolies - 15:50-16:00 Discussion
16:00-16.10 Coffee break
Session VIII - Chair: Emanuele Lepore
- 16:10-16:30 Into the Black Box research group (Bologna University)
Big Tech between Militarization and Authoritarianism: A Logistical Approach - 16:30-18:00 Roundtable coordinated by Emanuele Lepore (Ca' Foscari/CCTP) No Kings: Grassroots perspectives on the global crisis. With: Giulia dal Maso, Valentina Bonifacio, Lorenzo Feltrin (Ca' Foscari), Into the Black Box (Bologna University)
- 18:00-18:30 Discussion and closing remarks
19:00 Social dinner (free participation)