Events Schedule
Computing Power: AI as a Political Technology
- Time
- 4pm - 5pm
- Date
- 10 Feb 2026
- Duration
- 1 hour(s)
- Language
- English
- Presenters
Dr Félix Tréguer (CNRS; La Quadrature du Net)
- Cost
- free
- Registration Required
- No
- Registration Information
None required. Teams link available here: https://www.ucc.ie/en/casilac/researchclustersandcentres/politicaltechnologies/
- Organising Department
CASiLaC Political Technologies / Department of French
- Sustainable Development Goals
- No poverty, Sustainable cities and communities
Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of the ‘political technology’ , this talk argues that AI is a technique for integrating individuals into state and capital utility through continuous algorithmic modulation. Drawing on my trajectory as a scholar engaged in digital activism, I demonstrate how AI aggravates computing's existing pathologies: intensifying exploitation, crystallizing discrimination, and threatening new ‘disembeddings’ of social relations, and resource extraction. Against discourses of inevitability, I argue for a politics of refusal, pointing to struggles against data center proliferation as key sites of resistance and calling for self-reliant, federated, low-tech alternatives to the techno-scientific arms race. (This talk will be in English.)