Algorithms of Resistance and Antimacchine : A Dialogic Review about Algorithmic Agency and Creative Misuse in a Platform Society

Abstract

This dialogic review examines Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré’s book Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power alongside Antimacchine. Mancare di rispetto alla tecnologia [Anti-Machines: Disrespecting Technology] by Valentina Tanni. Bonini and Treré theorize algorithmic agency through the concepts of moral economy and everyday tactics, while Tanni addresses technological disobedience through the creative misappropriation and deconstruction of technological objects. Read together, the two works challenge representations of users just as passive subjects of platform power and show how workers, creators, activists, artists, but also ordinary users can appropriate technological systems in various ways. However, these forms of agency remain precarious: they are not equally accessible, are vulnerable to co-optation, and, above all, are often limited in scope and not sufficient to significantly transform the infrastructures they oppose. Examining examples of agency reveals the failure of a purely formal conception of private autonomy, and the subsequent need to move toward transparency, interoperability, and collective forms of governance as necessary conditions for more effective digital self-determination.