Malaise and crisis in the algorithmic civilisation

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ABSTRACT Over the past two decades the digital has increasingly shifted from the calculation and prediction to the speculation about and pre-emption of fear-inducing futures. Correlations have not only become actionable – data and algorithmic systems call for always more datafication and speculation, undermining previous assumptions about reality, the public sphere, and truth. Paradoxically, the more data we have, the more anxious, powerless and overwhelmed we feel. Data in its various constant recombinations as it is constantly redeployed and fed back, has come to produce meaning, occupy our life-worlds, and shape reality. Crucially, it powers ideology, further depriving us from the conditions for genuine political action. Within this new digital regime, risk and volatility are no longer the exception but the norm; and continuous crises have become naturalised as a structural condition. The rise of Generative AI in particular – with its ability to produce language and representations – has helped precipitate the onset of new forms of ‘absolutism of data’ which have compromised our ability to shape meaningful worlds for ourselves and tend to suffocate and alienate us as they confine us to uniformised and impoverished realities and epistemologies, whilst making us even more vulnerable to uncertainty.