BOOK PROJECT
- (in preparation, based on dissertation)
Planning, Computation, and Utopia in Twentieth-Century Political Thought
My first book project departs from the typical narration of AI as a story of scientific invention stretching from the mid-twentieth century to the present. AI and Revolutionary Desire traces an alternative lineage in twentieth-century utopian political thought—from scientific socialists and free-market fundamentalists to popular futurists and workers’ councils—who each articulated an early political concept of an algorithm as the imagined technical basis of a future to come. Routed through the writings of Lenin, Weber, Hayek, Luxemburg, and Neurath, the book argues that computational machinery and its purported “intelligence” have long been a site of political antagonism, contested between visions of the future from above and below and, in particular, over competing forms of planning—centralized, decentralized, and popular. Read as the political precursors of figures like von Neumann and Rosenblatt, the present-day politics of AI cannot be understood apart from this history of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary struggle over who, or what, ought to govern the organization of society. AI and Revolutionary Desire returns questions of rule, sovereignty, and insurgency to the history of algorithmic and artificial intelligence—as technologies that threatened to remodel the prevailing divisions between mental and manual labor, instruction and execution, distribution and production.