“If you think #technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology — and you don’t understand your problems.”[1] — Laurie Anderson, 2020
“To compare human and machine intelligence implies also a judgement about which human behaviour or social group is more intelligent than another, which workers can be replaced and which cannot. Ultimately, #AI is not only a tool for automating labour but also for imposing standards of mechanical intelligence that propagate, more or less invisibly, social hierarchies of knowledge and skill. As with any previous form of automation, AI does not simply replace workers but displaces and restructures them into a new social order.” [2] — Matteo Pasquinelli 2023
Through horizontal forms of intervention that prioritise marginalised perspectives, “Algorithmic Sabotage” articulates a collective approach to challenging the ideology of “algorithms everywhere”, in particular by shifting the focus from statistical inference to mutually constituting solidarity, by undertaking the activities necessary to generate prefigurative practices of resistance, agency and refusal that disrupt the algorithmic enclosure and overturn the application of continuous states of exception, highlighting the entanglement of the algorithmic harmfulness of “AI” with ongoing forms of societal disintegration, from austerity to far-right politics, and from racialized algorithmic violence to the propagation of patterns of segregation and exclusion.
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[1] Sterling, B. (2020) Laurie Anderson, machine learning artist-in-residence, Wired. Available at:
WIRED
Laurie Anderson, machine learning artist-in-residence
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[2] Pasquinelli, M. (2024) The eye of the master: A social history of artificial intelligence. London, UK: Verso. Available at:
Verso
The Eye of the Master
What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence" - a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind o...
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