2026· International Journal of Multidisciplinary in Humanities and Social Sciences· Vol 2, pp. 5-14· 0 citations
TL;DR
It is argued that AI is the new hyper-driven moment of commodification and cycle of global inequalities, which creates inconsistencies that break down established value and authority regimes, laying the ground for contestation and possible other trajectories.
Abstract
Artificial intelligence is commonly portrayed as a technical innovation that inaugurates a new social epoch defined by efficiency, automation, and rational governance. This article advances a dialectical anthropological critique of such narratives by situating artificial intelligence within the historical dynamics of capitalism, colonial power, and struggles over labor and knowledge. Conceptualizing artificial intelligence as a social relation rather than a neutral technology, the article draws on Marxian political economy, Fanonian analyses of colonial domination, Gramscian theories of hegemony, Polanyian insights about market disembedding, and Comaroffian critiques of contemporary capitalism. It contends that AI, through labour, epistemology, or governance, is the new hyper-driven moment of commodification and cycle of global inequalities. Meanwhile, AI creates inconsistencies that break down established value and authority regimes, laying the ground for contestation and possible other trajectories. The paper outlines new directions for a critical anthropology of AI that foregrounds historical materiality and contradictions while committing the field to decolonial epistemologies and transformative praxis.
Michel Foucault's theorisation of power/knowledge fundamentally altered the vocabulary through which political theory understands authority, subjectivity, and governance. Rejecting the classical juridical model of power as a possession exercised downward by a sovereign, Foucault described power as a relational, productive, and capillary force operating through discourse, institutions, and the body. This paper situates Foucault's framework within the wider ideological landscape of Western political thought — between liberal individualism, Marxist economism, Gramscian hegemony, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School — before tracing its trajectory from disciplinary and biopolitical formulations to its contemporary manifestation in algorithmic governance. It argues that while the disciplinary societies Foucault described regulated bodies through enclosure, surveillance, and normalisation, and biopolitical power extended this regulation to entire populations through statistics, public health, and demography, the emergence of big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics has produced a further mutation of power that this paper terms 'algorithmic governmentality.' Grounding the argument in documented cases — including the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, China's social credit system, India's Aadhaar programme, predictive policing in the United States, the Snowden revelations, and the European Union's regulatory responses under the GDPR and the AI Act — the paper identifies both the continuities between biopolitical and algorithmic power and the qualitative ruptures that distinguish them, particularly the shift from disciplining visible bodies to modulating probabilistic futures. The paper concludes that Foucault's framework, ideologically situated and empirically extended, remains indispensable for understanding contemporary digital power, even as it requires supplementation to account for the post-human, infra-individual character of algorithmic control.
Prashant Kumar· Journal of Ecohumanism· 0 citations
It is argued that anthropology requires a new conceptual framework for understanding the contemporary social life of artificial intelligence (AI), and "the magic of AI" is proposed as an analytical concept that shifts attention from AI's technical capacities to the beliefs, uncertainties, and sociotechnical imaginaries through which it acquires authority and efficacy.
M. Baas, Roanne van Voorst· Anthropological Theory· 2 citations
It is argued that contemporary artificial intelligence is best understood as a symptom and accelerator of modern nihilism rather than as a neutral instrument or proto-subject because it allows values to persist as calculable effects rather than contested commitments, thereby insulating human agents from the burden of judgment.
This article examines artificial intelligence as a “peripheral machine,” a dispositif that simultaneously extracts, reworks, and re-injects cultural and cognitive practices into global circuits of meaning. By analyzing emblematic cases such as Albania’s algorithmic avatar Diella, biased medical datasets, and automatic translation systems privileging dominant languages, the paper highlights how AI infrastructures reproduce asymmetric relations between centers and peripheries. Building on theories of epistemic extractivism, algorithmic sovereignty, and fractured geographies of sense, the analysis shows that AI does not merely optimize processes but reorganizes the very conditions of signification, reshaping who can speak, what counts as knowledge, and which lives are protected or excluded. Against universalist narratives of technological neutrality, the article advocates for a situated ethics of AI and the recognition of algoagents as co-constructive actors in the production of imaginaries, subjectivities, and collective futures. It calls for plural imaginaries and counter-spaces where communities and technologies can negotiate new forms of justice and emancipation.
Edmondo Grassi· Journal of Emerging Perspect...· 0 citations
This article critically interrogates the metaphor of artificial intelligence (AI) as a “final frontier,” revealing its colonial and expansionist roots and its inadequacy in capturing the embeddedness of AI systems within complex sociotechnical landscapes. Combining a geographical perspective with insights from computer engineering, we argue that the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act marks a paradigmatic shift from narratives of conquest to frameworks grounded in regulation, accountability, and coproduction. Through empirical vignettes in healthcare, recruitment, and criminal justice, we show how AI operates not in neutral or uncharted spaces, but within spatially and institutionally situated environments. Algorithmic systems both shape and are shaped by territorial infrastructures, legal frameworks, and social relations. By bridging disciplinary approaches, the paper advances a nuanced, interdisciplinary understanding of human–algorithm interaction – one that moves beyond deterministic imaginaries to address the spatial, political, and ethical dimensions of AI governance.
Emanuele Frontoni, Simona Epasto· Journal of Emerging Perspect...· 0 citations
The emergence of algorithmic authority has profoundly reshaped contemporary understandings of truth, knowledge, and human flourishing. As computational systems increasingly assume epistemic authority once entrusted to philosophical, religious, and civic institutions, the church faces a renewed challenge of bearing faithful witness within a culture governed by competing accounts of wisdom and power. This article argues that the apostle Paul’s logos tou staurou constitutes a rival account of reality that reconfigures knowledge, the identity of God, human flourishing, apostolic mission, and ultimately Christian public witness through a distinctively cruciform rationality, thereby challenging both ancient philosophical rationalism and contemporary algorithmic authority. By focusing on 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:16 and 9:19–23, this study demonstrates that the logos tou staurou (“word of the cross”) reconfigures wisdom, power, human identity, and mission through God’s self-revelation in the crucified Christ. Rather than presenting cruciformity as a secondary ethical consequence of salvation, Paul presents the cross as the self-revelation of God from which cruciform discipleship, apostolic mission, and faithful public witness necessarily flow. Bringing Paul’s theology of the cross into conversation with both the Stoic Logos of the first century and contemporary algorithmic authority, this article argues that the logos tou staurou offers a comprehensive theological alternative to rival cultural logoi by relocating wisdom from autonomous rationality to God’s cruciform self-revelation. While Stoicism and algorithmic systems promise human flourishing through rational autonomy and computational certainty, Paul locates divine wisdom in weakness, vulnerability, and self-giving love. The cross, therefore, provides the church with a distinctively cruciform rationality for faithful witness within an age increasingly shaped by algorithmic authority.
J. D. Crowder· Religions· 0 citations
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