Agenda

2-3 February 2026

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.

For further information: www.unive.it/worldalgorithm

Organised by ERC Project AI MODELS and Centre of Critical Theory and Politics (CCTP), Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

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Funded by the European Union within the ERC project AI MODELS (GA n. 101088645). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or ERCEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.