Affective Algorithms

My PhD considered the opportunities and challenges presented by digital technologies to citizens of a state where surveillance is an everyday fact of life. Cuba is an island with limited internet access, and with a state monopoly on all digital communications. Citizens can only access the internet through their national identification number. Just as Google and Facebook track their customers through cookies and other digital technologies, so the Cuban state monitors the interactions, preferences, and thought- processes of its own citizens online. But some citizens are also developing their own means of navigating this digital ecosystem, finding ways to mobilise the peculiarities of the Cuban socioeconomic system to their own advantage. My PhD describes an emerging digital and material 'smuggling' network, which extends beyond Cuba and across Latin America, and reveals the agency exerted by everyday people to create meaningful and prosperous lives for themselves, despite numerous obstacles.

After my PhD viva I was employed as a part-time ethnographic researcher on a 3 month project addressing similar issues of state surveillance and the use of digital technologies within public infrastructure. In this case, the research focused on the implementation of decision-making digital tools to assist in the provision of welfare within a London borough in the wake of COVID-19. I used ethnographic research methods to shed light on how local authorities are creating and harnessing data and algorithms to change citizen behaviour.

This project - 'Affective Algorithms' - aims to consolidate and publicise the key findings from my research to date, and to develop these ideas to move into new, related research on digital surveillance and 'wellbeing' in the wake of a global pandemic. Once again I aim to use ethnographic data to shed light upon the strategies employed by regular people to carve out meaningful existences for themselves in the face of socioeconomic rupture and technological shifts.

The main idea I seek to develop further is a form of 'digital panopticon', bringing Bentham and Foucault's ideas on discipline and state sovereignty into the 21st century by considering the relationship between state and citizen in the light of new artificially intelligent technologies. If the panopticon was the 19th and 20th century paradigm for understanding state control and processes of subjectification, my research shows how the rise of these intelligent surveillance technologies shifts us towards new forms of centralised power.

This points to a growing tension between the public and private sector: who owns, wields, and profits from these knowledge forms? While some scholars have addressed these ideas under the label of 'surveillance capitalism' (Zuboff 2019), my PhD research in Cuba provides a unique point of comparison by considering the implications of a one-party socialist state where everything technically pertains to the 'public sector', and where an informal private economy challenges these paradigms of centralised power.

Ultimately, this project will develop my theory of the subjectivities of everyday people as they navigate a climate of rupture, which is in turn the central subject of the monograph that will be the primary output of this fellowship. By developing the impact of my existing research through numerous publications and public engagement, and with the support of Dr Knox's mentorship and networks, I am confident I can develop these concepts into a robust New Investigator Grant application, allowing me to utilise concepts central to my past research to develop in a new direction along the border between digital anthropology, medical anthropology, data science, and political science.