Professor Tiziano Bonini, from the University of Siena, Italy, will be at UFMG as a guest of the IEAT Darcy Ribeiro Chair: Sovereignty, Education and Politics.

On June 6, 2025, he will give the conference Algorithms of resistance and the daily battle against the power of platforms, starting at 2 pm, in auditorium B106 of the Center for Didactic Activities 3 (CAD3) at UFMG. The event is open to the general public, with registration through the Even3 platform. Certificates of participation will be issued.

At the conference, Bonini will present reflections developed in the book Algorithms of Resistance, written by him in partnership with Emiliano Treré, from the University of Valencia, in Spain. The work was published in 2024 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Press).

In his presentation, Bonini will discuss the notion of “strategic algorithmic agency”, a concept that aims to explain the ability to manipulate the results of algorithmic computing in the interests of large corporations and platforms. The idea is to reflect on how powerful these algorithmic tools are and how they affect everyday decisions and the way we consume culture and services. Furthermore, Bonini intends to delve deeper into the extent to which it is possible to resist them. When addressing how workers, influencers and activists develop resistance tactics, Bonini addresses examples based on the experiences of “uberized” workers – the so-called gig workers. In the book, Bonini and Treré discuss both the strategies of large platforms to profit more and more from the exploitation of precarious work and, on the other hand, the forms of resistance that workers build collectively.

In his work, Professor Bonini discusses this challenge from three major domains among those most affected by algorithmic mediation: uberized workers, cultural infrastructure, and politics. From this axis, he covers important moments in the daily struggle with algorithmic systems and their growing ability to exert agency over individuals, their mode of political organization, their work, and their private sphere.

The book Algorithms of Resistance
Algorithms of Resistance presents a variety of ethnographic studies from both the Global North and the Global South, seeking to reveal forms of algorithmic agency and resistance and highlight how platform society is a battlefield contested by antagonistic forces. In the work, the authors begin by outlining their main theoretical framework: moral economies. This framework argues that algorithms exist on a continuum at the ends of which are two competing moral economies: the moral economy of the user and the moral economy of the platform.

The book chronicles the many inventive ways in which individuals can gain agency and resist the ubiquitous power of algorithms. Bonini and Treré reveal the moral imperative that lies with all of us—from delivery workers to artists and social movements—to resist algorithms. The book is dedicated “to all the workers, activists, and users who have shared with us their tactics of resistance to the power of digital platforms and their algorithms.”

The speaker
Tiziano Bonini holds a PhD in Media, Communication, and the Public Sphere from the University of Siena, and is currently an Associate Professor in Media Studies at the Department of Social, Political, and Cognitive Sciences at the same university. He has published several articles on radio and new media, including new modalities such as podcasts. His current research interests are the political economy of digital platforms and cultural industries.

About the event
The conference Algorithms of resistance and the daily battle against the power of platforms is held within the scope of the Darcy Ribeiro Chair: Sovereignty, Education and Politics of the IEAT in partnership with the Research Group on Democracy and Justice (Margem) of the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences (Fafich) of UFMG and has the support of the Network of Studies on Democracy and Disinformation (REDD), linked to the IEAT research groups program and the Foundation for Research Support of the State of Minas Gerais (Fapemig).