Dan M Kotliar
Biographic Data
| ID | 122009 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dan M Kotliar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dan M |
| FAMILY NAME | Kotliar |
| SIGNATURE | KOTLIAR D M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Haifa |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7028-1678 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 69 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Can't stop the hype: Scrutinizing AI's realities
Recently, we have been inundated with reports about the revolutions brought about by AI. However, much of our knowledge about these ‘revolutions’ arises from media sensationalism and advertising clamor – from AI hype. Therefore, to understand the societal impacts of AI, we must first grapple with its hype and ask: What truly transpires in the ‘revolutions’ allegedly brought about by AI? What role does hype play in them? This paper addresses this …
Silicon Valley revisited: On Californian ideologies and the differences they make
While research has highlighted the ties between algorithms and culture, this article focuses on how cross-cultural encounters shape developers’ perceptions of their algorithmic work. I ask: How do cultural transitions and intercultural encounters influence people’s perceptions of their algorithms? How do key issues regarding algorithmic production get translated and reinterpreted? Based on 50 semi-structured interviews with Israelis who immigrate…
Commodifying the microbial self: Microbiome-based personalization and the quest for symbiotic singularity
Research on the human microbiome has highlighted human-microbe interdependence, thus heralding a fundamental epistemic shift from a modernistic human individuality towards homo-microbial symbioticism. This shift is largely afforded by machine-learning algorithms that have also led to the popularization and commodification of this new episteme. Startup companies have accordingly begun developing microbiome-based AI-powered products, offering consu…
Keeping Pegasus on the wing: Legitimizing cyber espionage
NSO Group is an Israeli cyber surveillance firm notorious for Pegasus – an intrusive malware capable of covertly taking control of smartphones and remotely extracting their contents. In 2019, after a series of unflattering reports on governments’ use of Pegasus to infiltrate the phones of activists and journalists, NSO embarked on an uncharacteristically public legitimation campaign. This article focuses on this campaign and explores how this oth…
Migrating the state into corporate clouds
This article examines the cloudification of the state by focusing on ‘Project Nimbus’ – a $1.2 billion tender offered by the Israeli government to move ‘the entire Israeli state’ into corporate clouds. As one of the biggest informational infrastructure projects Israel has known, Nimbus revolves around the construction or repurposing of six massive, resource-hungry corporate data centers and the ‘migration’ of the state into them. Accordingly, Nim…
The Data Center Cannot Hold: Data Colonialism and the “Nimbus Project”
Following the infrastructural turn in media studies with its focus on the material and social practices, this paper offers to reexamine contemporary data colonialism by empirically exploring some of its most crucial infrastructural artifacts – data centers. Particularly, this paper explores six data centers currently built in Israel as part of "Project Nimbus" – a $1.2 billion tender offered by the Israeli government to move its computational inf…
Contextualizing the ethics of algorithms: A socio-professional approach
Research on AI ethics tends to examine the subject through philosophical, legal, or technical perspectives, largely neglecting the sociocultural one. This literature also predominantly focuses on Europe and the United States. Addressing these gaps, this article explores how data scientists justify and explain the ethics of their algorithmic work. Based on a pragmatist social analysis, and of 60 semi-structured interviews with Israeli data scienti…
On the Contesting Conceptualisation of the Human Body: Between 'Homo-Microbis' and 'Homo-Algorithmicus
Microbiome science has highlighted human and microbial interdependency, offering a radical epistemic shift from the individualistic view of the human body and self. Research has accordingly offered to see humans as 'homo-microbis' - complex biomolecular networks composed of humans and their associated microbes. While social scientists have begun to address microbiome science, the proliferation and commodification of the homo-microbial episteme ha…
Contextualizing Ai Ethics in Time and Space
While the interest in AI ethics has overwhelmingly intensified over the last decade, and while various initiatives seek its institutionalization, the literature on algorithmic ethics tends to examine the subject through philosophical, legal, or technocratic perspectives, largely neglecting the empirical, socio-cultural ones. Moreover, this literature tends to focus on the United States, and to overlook other tech centers around the world. This pa…
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
Decades before Cambridge Analytica algorithmically manipulated voters on both sides of the Atlantic, before Silicon Valley data barons threatened to disrupt democracy worldwide, and before social m
Who Gets to Choose? On the Socio-algorithmic Construction of Choice
This article deals with choice-inducing algorithms--algorithms that are explicitly designed to affect people's choices. Based on an ethnographic account of three Israeli data analytics companies, I explore how algorithms are being designed to drive people into choice-making and examine their co-constitution by an assemblage of specifically positioned human and nonhuman agents. I show that the functioning, logic, and even ethics of choice-inducing…
Algorithmic Production Beyond Silicon Valley
The last years have seen a proliferation of research on the social ramifications of algorithms (Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018) and the power of algorithms was insightfully theorized (Gillespie 2016; Bucher 2018). At the same time, scholars have begun to examine the ties between algorithms and culture (Seaver 2017), describing algorithms as products of complex socio-algorithmic assemblages (Gillespie 2016, 24), with often very local socio-technical his…
The return of the social: Algorithmic identity in an age of symbolic demise
This article explores the socio-algorithmic construction of identity categories based on an ethnographic study of the Israeli data analytics industry. While algorithmic categorization has been described as a post-textual phenomenon that leaves language, social theory, and social expertise behind, this article focuses on the return of the social—the process through which the symbolic means resurface to turn algorithmically produced clusters into i…
Data orientalism: On the algorithmic construction of the non-Western other
Transmitted trauma as badge of honor: Phenomenological accounts of Holocaust descendant resilient vulnerability
Emotional Oppositions: The Political Struggle over Citizens' Emotions
Depression Narratives in Blogs: A Collaborative Quest for Coherence
People with depression often suffer from severe social seclusion, and the lack of an agreed upon etiology for depression makes it difficult to satisfactorily narrate and "ritually control" it. Focusing on blogs by women with major depression, I delineate the ways in which bloggers publicly express and collaboratively reconstruct their depression narratives. Specifically, using thematic analysis, I argue that depression blogs uniquely bridge betwe…
Transmitted trauma as badge of honor: Phenomenological accounts of Holocaust descendant resilient vulnerability
The return of the social: Algorithmic identity in an age of symbolic demise
This article explores the socio-algorithmic construction of identity categories based on an ethnographic study of the Israeli data analytics industry. While algorithmic categorization has been described as a post-textual phenomenon that leaves language, social theory, and social expertise behind, this article focuses on the return of the social—the process through which the symbolic means resurface to turn algorithmically produced clusters into i…
Who Gets to Choose? On the Socio-algorithmic Construction of Choice
This article deals with choice-inducing algorithms--algorithms that are explicitly designed to affect people's choices. Based on an ethnographic account of three Israeli data analytics companies, I explore how algorithms are being designed to drive people into choice-making and examine their co-constitution by an assemblage of specifically positioned human and nonhuman agents. I show that the functioning, logic, and even ethics of choice-inducing…
Data orientalism: On the algorithmic construction of the non-Western other
Depression Narratives in Blogs: A Collaborative Quest for Coherence
People with depression often suffer from severe social seclusion, and the lack of an agreed upon etiology for depression makes it difficult to satisfactorily narrate and "ritually control" it. Focusing on blogs by women with major depression, I delineate the ways in which bloggers publicly express and collaboratively reconstruct their depression narratives. Specifically, using thematic analysis, I argue that depression blogs uniquely bridge betwe…
Contextualizing the ethics of algorithms: A socio-professional approach
Research on AI ethics tends to examine the subject through philosophical, legal, or technical perspectives, largely neglecting the sociocultural one. This literature also predominantly focuses on Europe and the United States. Addressing these gaps, this article explores how data scientists justify and explain the ethics of their algorithmic work. Based on a pragmatist social analysis, and of 60 semi-structured interviews with Israeli data scienti…
Emotional Oppositions: The Political Struggle over Citizens' Emotions
On the Contesting Conceptualisation of the Human Body: Between 'Homo-Microbis' and 'Homo-Algorithmicus
Microbiome science has highlighted human and microbial interdependency, offering a radical epistemic shift from the individualistic view of the human body and self. Research has accordingly offered to see humans as 'homo-microbis' - complex biomolecular networks composed of humans and their associated microbes. While social scientists have begun to address microbiome science, the proliferation and commodification of the homo-microbial episteme ha…
Emotional Oppositions: The Political Struggle over Citizens' Emotions
Depression Narratives in Blogs: A Collaborative Quest for Coherence
People with depression often suffer from severe social seclusion, and the lack of an agreed upon etiology for depression makes it difficult to satisfactorily narrate and "ritually control" it. Focusing on blogs by women with major depression, I delineate the ways in which bloggers publicly express and collaboratively reconstruct their depression narratives. Specifically, using thematic analysis, I argue that depression blogs uniquely bridge betwe…
Transmitted trauma as badge of honor: Phenomenological accounts of Holocaust descendant resilient vulnerability
Algorithmic Production Beyond Silicon Valley
The last years have seen a proliferation of research on the social ramifications of algorithms (Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018) and the power of algorithms was insightfully theorized (Gillespie 2016; Bucher 2018). At the same time, scholars have begun to examine the ties between algorithms and culture (Seaver 2017), describing algorithms as products of complex socio-algorithmic assemblages (Gillespie 2016, 24), with often very local socio-technical his…
The return of the social: Algorithmic identity in an age of symbolic demise
This article explores the socio-algorithmic construction of identity categories based on an ethnographic study of the Israeli data analytics industry. While algorithmic categorization has been described as a post-textual phenomenon that leaves language, social theory, and social expertise behind, this article focuses on the return of the social—the process through which the symbolic means resurface to turn algorithmically produced clusters into i…
Data orientalism: On the algorithmic construction of the non-Western other
Contextualizing Ai Ethics in Time and Space
While the interest in AI ethics has overwhelmingly intensified over the last decade, and while various initiatives seek its institutionalization, the literature on algorithmic ethics tends to examine the subject through philosophical, legal, or technocratic perspectives, largely neglecting the empirical, socio-cultural ones. Moreover, this literature tends to focus on the United States, and to overlook other tech centers around the world. This pa…
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
Decades before Cambridge Analytica algorithmically manipulated voters on both sides of the Atlantic, before Silicon Valley data barons threatened to disrupt democracy worldwide, and before social m
Who Gets to Choose? On the Socio-algorithmic Construction of Choice
This article deals with choice-inducing algorithms--algorithms that are explicitly designed to affect people's choices. Based on an ethnographic account of three Israeli data analytics companies, I explore how algorithms are being designed to drive people into choice-making and examine their co-constitution by an assemblage of specifically positioned human and nonhuman agents. I show that the functioning, logic, and even ethics of choice-inducing…
The Data Center Cannot Hold: Data Colonialism and the “Nimbus Project”
Following the infrastructural turn in media studies with its focus on the material and social practices, this paper offers to reexamine contemporary data colonialism by empirically exploring some of its most crucial infrastructural artifacts – data centers. Particularly, this paper explores six data centers currently built in Israel as part of "Project Nimbus" – a $1.2 billion tender offered by the Israeli government to move its computational inf…
Contextualizing the ethics of algorithms: A socio-professional approach
Research on AI ethics tends to examine the subject through philosophical, legal, or technical perspectives, largely neglecting the sociocultural one. This literature also predominantly focuses on Europe and the United States. Addressing these gaps, this article explores how data scientists justify and explain the ethics of their algorithmic work. Based on a pragmatist social analysis, and of 60 semi-structured interviews with Israeli data scienti…
On the Contesting Conceptualisation of the Human Body: Between 'Homo-Microbis' and 'Homo-Algorithmicus
Microbiome science has highlighted human and microbial interdependency, offering a radical epistemic shift from the individualistic view of the human body and self. Research has accordingly offered to see humans as 'homo-microbis' - complex biomolecular networks composed of humans and their associated microbes. While social scientists have begun to address microbiome science, the proliferation and commodification of the homo-microbial episteme ha…
Commodifying the microbial self: Microbiome-based personalization and the quest for symbiotic singularity
Research on the human microbiome has highlighted human-microbe interdependence, thus heralding a fundamental epistemic shift from a modernistic human individuality towards homo-microbial symbioticism. This shift is largely afforded by machine-learning algorithms that have also led to the popularization and commodification of this new episteme. Startup companies have accordingly begun developing microbiome-based AI-powered products, offering consu…
Keeping Pegasus on the wing: Legitimizing cyber espionage
NSO Group is an Israeli cyber surveillance firm notorious for Pegasus – an intrusive malware capable of covertly taking control of smartphones and remotely extracting their contents. In 2019, after a series of unflattering reports on governments’ use of Pegasus to infiltrate the phones of activists and journalists, NSO embarked on an uncharacteristically public legitimation campaign. This article focuses on this campaign and explores how this oth…
Migrating the state into corporate clouds
This article examines the cloudification of the state by focusing on ‘Project Nimbus’ – a $1.2 billion tender offered by the Israeli government to move ‘the entire Israeli state’ into corporate clouds. As one of the biggest informational infrastructure projects Israel has known, Nimbus revolves around the construction or repurposing of six massive, resource-hungry corporate data centers and the ‘migration’ of the state into them. Accordingly, Nim…
Silicon Valley revisited: On Californian ideologies and the differences they make
While research has highlighted the ties between algorithms and culture, this article focuses on how cross-cultural encounters shape developers’ perceptions of their algorithmic work. I ask: How do cultural transitions and intercultural encounters influence people’s perceptions of their algorithms? How do key issues regarding algorithmic production get translated and reinterpreted? Based on 50 semi-structured interviews with Israelis who immigrate…
Can't stop the hype: Scrutinizing AI's realities
Recently, we have been inundated with reports about the revolutions brought about by AI. However, much of our knowledge about these ‘revolutions’ arises from media sensationalism and advertising clamor – from AI hype. Therefore, to understand the societal impacts of AI, we must first grapple with its hype and ask: What truly transpires in the ‘revolutions’ allegedly brought about by AI? What role does hype play in them? This paper addresses this …
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (10 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (5 works) · Data science (4 works) · Social science (4 works) · Ethnography (3 works)