Living with, and within, complex computational networks, which increasingly enable and shape our every action, unsurprisingly ramps up our anxieties about our capacity to act. On the one hand, the liberal idea of self, according to which we are autonomous and self-determined agents fully in control of our destinies, stubbornly persist. We are constantly being told to realize our potential, to take matters into our own hands, to assume full responsibility: our media and institutions continue to interpellate us as sovereign subjects. On the other hand, the socio-technological systems in which we are embedded are becoming increasingly agential, permeating every aspect of our daily existence. A simple act of scrolling through the stream of content on your smartphone is conditioned by your own digital footprint, practically infinite data harvested from other users, intricate algorithmic infrastructures, energy-thirsty data centers, content moderators in the Global South, battery lithium from mines in Chile or Zimbabwe, etc. The user, then, finds themselves at the junction of the promises of individual autonomy and the agential vectors of planetary computation. This double bind is not an easy thing to navigate: it is no wonder that ‘people think the 5G cell towers are melting the boundaries of their egos’ (Bratton, 2021).

This symposium situates itself within this tension and engages with the complex knot linked to the concept of agency today. Our aim is to rethink agency in the age of planetary computation while exploring the link between agency and asymmetric power relations today. This requires us to remain critical of those discourses that uphold and encourage the fantasy of autonomy and the tired yet no less problematic concept of the self it presupposes. 

Yet, we are also required to expand our thinking beyond the analysis of disciplinary institutions (Foucault, 1975), which repeatedly nudge individuals into the internalization of norms and the responsibility for adhering to them. The algorithmic environments that we inhabit today no longer enforce normative restrictions: we are ‘free’ to scroll, communicate, upload, share, consume. The more we do so, the more data we feed into the recommendation systems and datasets for training AI models. The reproduction of asymmetric power relations then shifts from the imposition of norms towards the prediction and modulation of behaviour (Zuboff 2019; Deleuze 1990; Chenney-Lippold 2017). 

We are interested in thinking within the intersection of 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?

In order to address these questions, the symposium will bring together an international and interdisciplinary group of researchers who will approach the issue of agency in the age of planetary computation from a wide range of perspectives, both theoretical and practical. The aim is to facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue which, we believe, is the only way to fully grasp the complexities of our current digital milieus.

The project is co-funded by the ISF Fund of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.