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Title Algorthmic Governance and cyberocracy: Speculating the New Social Machine in M.T Anderson's feed and Dave Eggars' The Circle

Author(s) KOMAL ATTA

Abstract Title: Algorithmic Governance and Cyberocracy Speculating the New Social Machine in Dave Eggers’ The Circle and MT Anderson’s Feed With an increasing integration of human beings with technology, human society has turned into a social machine where maximum human participation is ensured by entrapping them in feedback loops to extract maximum data from their online and real world through algorithmic governance. This data extraction is monetized by selling it to companies for prediction products and used further for their behavior modification. In this whole process, human privacy, freedom, sovereignty and human nature is at stake. The present study aims to read two dystopian science fiction novels that are The Circle (2013) by Dave Eggers and Feed (2002) by Mathew Toby Anderson by using the theoretical underpinnings of surveillance capitalism, the term coined by Shoshana Zuboff and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of societies of control, supplemented with the concepts of algorithmic governance, cyberocracy and social machines. Surveillance capitalism is the new economic system where human experiences are collected as data and get parsed and analyzed via algorithmic governance and become an asset for surveillance capitalists who monetize it by organizing it as information. This new emerging Instrumentarian power gained through collection of information may be equated with Cyberocracy. The objective of the present study is to investigate the role of social machines in behavior modification; the threats posed to privacy and freedom; and deployment of information as power and the depiction of resistance to such power in the studied novels. The novels depict the controlling power of internet companies adversely impacting human nature and privacy. The characters in the novel are portrayed as helpless to resist the unprecedented rising Instrumentarian power. The study has concluded that technology enters our lives as a need but the puppet masters use it for controlling human society for it demands the rendition of bodies and souls to it by our full participation in the social machines. These social machines are helpful in behavior modification as each participant presents itself in a way to receive social approval. This ubiquitous participation in social media platforms makes our privacy vulnerable and this access to each and every type of information thus paves the way toward cyberocracy. Human beings must have to stop and think about their endangered future

Type Thesis/Dissertation

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2023-12-08

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