On the Case of Palantir and the AI That Oppresses and Kills In the historical period we inhabit, a certain disillusionment is rising among many people who saw information and communication technologies – and the internet in particular – as a great opportunity for general emancipation. "Something went wrong," we often hear repeated (Luna 2025). To be honest, we cannot deny the great enthusiasm and hopes that have supported and still support, in a certain way, the digital transition in almost every sector of human activities. However, as media scholars and researchers …
artificial intelligence
A Little Socio-Technical Dictionary of AI and the Chaotic Reality of Algorithmic Culture
In this article we will discuss some key elements and concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We will try to outline a brief history in order to highlight how its plot is woven from technical, social and cultural aspects that justify the claims – by the human communities in which these technologies are built and applied – to criticize and generally control its developments. This claim, moreover, is useful to counterbalance both the narratives aimed at exaggerating the expectations that are generated around AI, and the accusations according to which these criticisms …
On the Suicidal Teen and the Chatbot – Artificial Intelligence as a socio-technical issue
In the previous article we opened a reflection on the condition of life we currently find ourselves hybridized as we are with the functional and psychic extensions offered by digital environments. In it we stated that a fruitful way to consider the evolution of the social developments thus generated is to analyze them in a dynamic in which our natural tendency to establish machinic partnerships should critically confront with the set of processes and factors that allow us to move in this direction and build interactions. Such a set should be understood in terms of …
Digital life between machinic partnerships and algorithmic institutionalism*
Being a citizen of the 21st century involves having an increasing intimacy of use – and even bodily hybridization – with technologies of all kinds ( bio, info, nano and neuro), as well as with algorithmic organizations/entities that have become, as matter of fact, cultural and social global institutions. We exist and operate in the world as composite and interacting assemblages of materials deriving from what we call nature, culture or technology, and in doing so we move within certain normative and value frames. Processes of hybridization have distinguished human beings …
[Read more...] about Digital life between machinic partnerships and algorithmic institutionalism*