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 monopolies, technological rent, and AI-driven automation, as well as de-industrialisation and stagnation. On one level, we have witnessed the rise of global monopolies of knowledge extractivism and AI, which threaten labour composition and even the geopolitical equilibria between East and West. Some authors have attempted to capture this shift through the controversial thesis of ‘technofeudalism.’ What is certainly needed is an analysis of the new composition of labour (such as microwork) in relation to the growing role of knowledge and technological rent in the present crisis.
On another level, however, it is necessary to interrogate whether these new hi-tech monopolies (including AI) contribute to a crisis of valorisation rather than to productivity. Seeking an exit from the crisis, they have forged new alliances with authoritarian politics and have even enlisted AI models as battlegrounds in 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 a cultural war — at times an actual war — in order to obscure its economic origins. 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.
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
Further information about the full programme will be published soon.
Keynote lectures
- Cédric Durand, Université de Genève, Department of History, Economics and Society
- Cecilia Rikap, University College London, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
- Grégoire Chamayou, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
- Ben Tarnoff, Writer
- Moira Weigel, Harvard University, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society