The World Algorithm
Knowledge and Power in the New Global Order
Symposium, 2-3 February 2026, Venice

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.

Symposium flyer

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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.