Digital Materialities and Algorithmic Management: From Infrastructural Power to Embodied Labour
Digital labour is often seen as virtual and weightless. Yet as Büscher (2025), Surie (2020), as well as Timko and Melik (2021) show, digital systems are profoundly material. Algorithms move bodies, structure wages, and shape subjectivity. Across these sources, digital materiality emerges not as an abstract technological layer but as the infrastructural condition of platform capitalism, where data, prediction, and human effort are fused into a single field of governance. AI as Infrastructural Power Büscher (2025) argues that artificial intelligence is now the core of platform capitalism. Rather than simply supporting economic processes, AI structures them. He describes AI as “statistics on steroids,” operating through predictive logic rather than evaluation of truth. Platforms no longer determine whether information is accurate, but whether it is profitable. In this system, truth becomes a probabilistic commodity, shaped by the priorities of private infrastructures. Bü...
