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Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power
How global workers, influencers, and activists develop tactics of algorithmic resistance by appropriating and repurposing the same algorithms that control our lives.
Algorithms are all around us, permeating more and more aspects of our daily lives. While accounts of platform power tend to come across as bleak and monolithic, Algorithms of Resistance shows how people can resist algorithms across a variety of domains. Drawing from rich ethnographic materials and perspectives from both the Global North and South, authors Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré explore how people appropriate and reconfigure algorithms to pursue their objectives in three domains of everyday gig work, cultural industries, and politics. They reveal how forms of algorithmic agency and resistance are endemic and mundane and how the platform society is a contested battleground of contrasting forces.
Bonini and Treré begin by outlining their key theoretical framework of moral economies. This framework argues that algorithms exist on a continuum. At its two extremes are two competing moral the user moral economy and the platform moral economy. From here, Algorithms of Resistance chronicles the various inventive ways that individuals can work to achieve agency and resist the ubiquitous power of algorithms. Casting a wide net with a diverse range of case studies, Bonini and Treré reveal the moral imperative for all of us—from delivery drivers to artists to social movements—to resist algorithms.
Algorithms are all around us, permeating more and more aspects of our daily lives. While accounts of platform power tend to come across as bleak and monolithic, Algorithms of Resistance shows how people can resist algorithms across a variety of domains. Drawing from rich ethnographic materials and perspectives from both the Global North and South, authors Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré explore how people appropriate and reconfigure algorithms to pursue their objectives in three domains of everyday gig work, cultural industries, and politics. They reveal how forms of algorithmic agency and resistance are endemic and mundane and how the platform society is a contested battleground of contrasting forces.
Bonini and Treré begin by outlining their key theoretical framework of moral economies. This framework argues that algorithms exist on a continuum. At its two extremes are two competing moral the user moral economy and the platform moral economy. From here, Algorithms of Resistance chronicles the various inventive ways that individuals can work to achieve agency and resist the ubiquitous power of algorithms. Casting a wide net with a diverse range of case studies, Bonini and Treré reveal the moral imperative for all of us—from delivery drivers to artists to social movements—to resist algorithms.
256 pages, Paperback
Published February 6, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 23, 2024
Free download of PDF: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monog...
July 8, 2025
So academic it’s difficult to parse at times. Basically this is about people organizing IRL to subvert online algorithms, from gig workers having chat groups to share tips to K-pop fans engaging in lovebombing. Occasionally interesting but mostly sociological mumbo jumbo, like long digressions on the definition of “resistance”. Recommended for insomniacs and masochists.
July 30, 2025
Disappointed.. expected a great book on surveillance capitalism and hacktivism, but the narrative is all over the place. Too many quotes and unecessary jargon that are haphazardly placed without actually being incorporated into the thought process. The topic is incredibly interesting but the writing could be more cohesive and well-developed
March 25, 2024
Scarrily insightful study about how technology is controlling working lives.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews