Joana Moll: The User and The Beast

Thursday, September 18, 2025, 5:30 pm
KAM 62

Talk Abstract:

• Contemporary discourse often assumes that “everything is connected.” Yet, as Graham Harman argues, we must remember that, in fact, “everything is not connected.” Indeed, the actual configuration of networked technologies creates and reinforces cultural dynamics that encourage disconnectedness. Although most of our daily transactions depend on connected devices, users remain largely oblivious to the complex web that constitutes the Internet: a gigantic, yet incredibly obfuscated maze of tangled contingencies and materialities—including algorithms, tracking technologies, devices, data centers, energy, marketers, designers, engineers, CEOs, business models, labour, money, emotions, ideologies, and foremost, user data—operating through millions of human and non-human bodies on a planetary scale. However, regardless of the compelling role of this diverse assemblage in organizing and activating our so-called networked society, its historical, political, material, and affective dimensions are dramatically overlooked. This neglect has exposed the diversity of living bodies that compose the Internet to increasingly exploitative practices, primarily orchestrated by corporate-controlled algorithms and their intermediaries. Such unseen exploitation, in turn, precludes the possibility of resisting, repairing, and reshaping these systems to make them truly sustainable. Therefore, in order to start imagining and inhabiting them in a sustainable way, it is urgent to create new paradigms that propose a renewed way to imagine the diverse sets of relationships that give the Internet its shape.