AI-Driven Platforms, Power, and Individual Subjugation and Resistance

Emerging platform capitalism reconfigures industrial operation, muddying ongoing turbulence as an unsustainable constitutive regime of accumulation. Pillaging data, energy, labour, nature, culture, and everyday life, driven by opaque algorithms, it prioritizes automativity over profitability. Yet subjugation is neither total nor uniform. Fractured by race, gender, class, geography, and citizenship, capital platformization is metabolized in varying ways across geographies. Multifaceted contestations everywhere point to plural forms of social engagement resisting digital technology and the totalizing logic of its latest AI iteration.

Submissions should be theoretically sound, empirically robust, and, preferably, comparatively focused to advance digital sociology’s understanding of the interconnections among platform capitalism, the naturalization of human and non-human subjugation, and global social resistance. Contributions may rest on recognized theoretical frameworks. Bold new approaches should address techno-enforced ignorance to enhance systemic sociological understanding of processes and relations.

Topics of particular interest include:

- algorithmic management and its discontents;

- gig workers' mobilization and collective contestations across sectors and regions;

- digital solidarity initiatives that advance peacefully negotiated alternative structures.

Research on gendered and racialized platforms in the Global South could spur the development of evidence-based global strategies to advance emancipatory engagement with digital technology.

For a thorough overview, papers should examine platform governance, regulatory contestation, and democratic recapture. We welcome methodological diversity in the study of the emerging relationship between platform extractives and generative artificial intelligence.

Submissions from scholars based in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and non-EU Europe are strongly encouraged.