Algorithmic Governance of Affect: Digital Platforms, Labor, and Managed Emotions

This session aims to explore how contemporary platform capitalism reconfigures human affect, bodily sensibilities, and digital labor into systematic extraction mechanisms. As digital platforms increasingly operate as algorithmic infrastructures, they do not merely host social interactions; they actively govern, quantify, and colonize user emotions and subjective experiences. By shifting the sociological focus toward techno-feudal dynamics and the structural extraction of 'cloud rent'; this session provides a critical space to examine how organic cultural solidarity, everyday desires, and affective labor are systematically enclosed by digital landlords to regulate social energies.
To ground these transformations, we invite theoretical and empirical interventions that address new forms of algorithmic capture, platform precarity, and the political economy of sensibilities. We particularly welcome papers that investigate how platforms reshape the boundaries of work by converting lived experiences and managed emotions into profitable assets. Ultimately, this session seeks to contribute to the broader discourse on society in transformation by analyzing how contemporary platformization redefines power, alienation, and the collective management of affect in the digital age.