Alex Gekker
Biographic Data
| ID | 129476 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Gekker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Gekker |
| SIGNATURE | GEKKER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6042-2086 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Scaling Ai in the Cloud: The Disruption of “Cloudification” in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles
This paper examines the case of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)—cars integrating “smart” digital components—to explore how “cloudification” has emerged as a key infrastructural transformation in the industrialization of AI. CAVs illustrate the “industrialization” of AI as it moves beyond specialized applications to acquire infrastructural characteristics across multiple industries. The paper builds upon insights from three fields: platfo…
Infrastructural hubris and platform power: The failed scalability of Google Stadia
This article examines Google Stadia, a cloud gaming platform that closed in 2023 after less than four years despite being built on Google’s global infrastructure. Through a thematic analysis of 170 documents including specialized press articles, Reddit discussions, and YouTube reviews, we investigate Stadia’s failure by examining its main stakeholders’ perspectives, i.e., gamers and game developers. Drawing on infrastructure studies’ focus on bre…
Driving the hype: LLMs as ‘general-purpose’ promise in the autonomous vehicle industry
Proponents of autonomous vehicles are proclaiming a new era, driven by innovations derived from large language models (LLMs). Following a decade of highly public failures and the concurrent redirection of capital and attention towards generative AI, firms in the autonomous vehicle industry have turned to LLM-style techniques as the basis for a rebooted commercialisation effort. Through a technographic analysis of an annual industry event, Nvidia …
Orchestrating scalability: How patents render cloud imaginaries in CAV innovation
This article explores how cloud computing enables and shapes the scaling of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), positioning cloud infrastructure as a technology, strategy, and imaginary central to the scaling of AI. Using a dataset of 69,421 global patent families, we analyse how diverse actors—including automotive manufacturers, chipmakers, electronics companies, autonomous vehicle firms, and telecom/mapping providers—mobilise cloud techno…
In the Shadow of LLMS: Trouble in the “Smart” Automotive Industry
This paper explores the tumultuous landscape of the modern automotive industry, once heralded as the epitome of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications through the promise of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The introduction of large language models (LLMs), notably with ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, marked a turning point, casting shadows over the ambitious goals set by major tech and automotive players. …
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…
Vladdydaddy on Tiktok: Imagined Intimacy and Memetic Participation in Times of War
Vladdydaddy is a popular internet meme that emerged during the 2016 elections in the United States on 4chan and Twitter to characterize the perceived submissive behavior of Donald Trump towards Vladimir Putin. The meme re-emerged on TikTok in the days leading to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, gaining a new meaning. This paper is part of a larger research project with the objective of identifying and scrutinizing various forms o…
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…
A God-Tier Larp? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins o…
The Industry of Landlords: Exploring the Assetization of the Triple-A Game
The monetization of the modern Triple-A game has undergone severe changes, as free-to-play revenue models and game as a service distribution strategy have become standard for game developers. To date, the established tradition of the industry’s political–economic analysis focused on the value extraction and user exploitation of video game as a cultural commodity, centered on the video game as generating value through the selling of boxed or digit…
Google Maps’ Covid-19 layer as an interface for pandemic life
The paper explores Google Maps' COVID-19 layer, a special feature launched by the cartographic platform in September 2020, and shut down two years later. Through the reading of promotional corporate blogposts and interfacial analysis of the layer, it critiques the layers' mediation of the pandemic, caught between public health needs and Google's overarching ethos. The analysis underscores three central claims: that interfacial choices endemic to …
Cloud Culture: Fluid Memories on Platform Enclosures
This paper brings together emerging work on the platformisation of cultural production (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Duffy, Poell, and Nieborg 2019) with (critical) approaches to digital archiving (Berry 2016; Brügger 2018; Ben-David 2019) and algorithmic curation (Noble 2018; Amoore 2020) to explore a proposed emerging ‘cloud culture’. The term encompasses (1) the technological capacity to modify cultural commodities after they have reached (and perh…
Against Game Studies
The article explores the limitations of the current scholarly game studies (GS) field. Its central presuppositions are (1) that there are certain attributes broadly understood as “GS” by those writing in or adjacent to the field; (2) that those attributes are historically rooted in an attempt to disassociate videogames from other types of electronic (and later—digital) media; and that (3) the preconditions that have led to this split are currentl…
Playing Politics: How Sabarimala Played Out on TikTok
TikTok is commonly known as a playful, silly platform where teenagers share 15-second videos of crazy stunts or act out funny snippets from popular culture. In the past few years, it has experienced exponential growth and popularity, unseating Facebook as the most downloaded app. Interestingly, recent news coverage notes the emergence of TikTok as a political actor in the Indian context. They raise concerns over the abundance of divisive content,…
Re-Valuing Platforms, Reclaiming the Local
This panel brings together emerging scholarship that challenges the contemporary hold of major platforms over public and private life. It critically questions the scope, valence, and embeddedness of platforms in the everyday, challenging (commercial) platformization as the new normal. We attempt to offer new ways of managing, changing and co-opting platforms for the benefit of end-users rather than proprietors only. To this end, the panel discuss…
Temporal Frames for Platform Publics: The Platformization of Breadtube
In this paper we suggest the notion of $2 to account for the intermingling of socio-technical processes that make online platforms (in this case: YouTube) resistant to stable definitions. It has been over a decade of YouTube studies and yet, a consensus on what precisely YouTube is seems unlikely. Arguably, Burgess and Green began this ontological quest with the first edition of YouTube (2008) in which they set out ‘to work through some of the of…
Mapping Interfacial Regimes of Control: A Qualitative Analysis of America’s Post-9/11 Security Technology Infrastructure
Recent technological advancements in surveillance and data analysis software have drastically transformed how the United States manages its immigration and national security systems. In particular, an increased emphasis on information sharing and predictive threat modeling following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has prompted agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security to acquire powerful data analysis software from private…
Infrastructural surveillance
This article proposes a new model of privacy: infrastructural surveillance. It departs from Agre’s classic distinction between surveillance and capture by examining the sociotechnical claims of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as requiring totalising surveillance of passengers and environment in order to operate. By doing so, it contributes to the ongoing debate on the commodification and platformisation of life, paying attention to the u…
Time for mapping: Cartographic temporalities
The digital era has brought about huge transformations in the map itself, which to date have been largely conceptualised in spatial terms. Novel objects, forms, processes and approaches have emerged and pose new, pressing questions about the temporality of digital maps and contemporary mapping practices: in spite of its implicit spatiality, digital mapping is strongly grounded in time. This collection brings time back into the map, taking up Dore…
Between two hypes: Will “big data” help unravel blind spots in understanding the “global land rush?”
Between two hypes: Will “big data” help unravel blind spots in understanding the “global land rush?”
Playing Politics: How Sabarimala Played Out on TikTok
TikTok is commonly known as a playful, silly platform where teenagers share 15-second videos of crazy stunts or act out funny snippets from popular culture. In the past few years, it has experienced exponential growth and popularity, unseating Facebook as the most downloaded app. Interestingly, recent news coverage notes the emergence of TikTok as a political actor in the Indian context. They raise concerns over the abundance of divisive content,…
Infrastructural surveillance
This article proposes a new model of privacy: infrastructural surveillance. It departs from Agre’s classic distinction between surveillance and capture by examining the sociotechnical claims of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as requiring totalising surveillance of passengers and environment in order to operate. By doing so, it contributes to the ongoing debate on the commodification and platformisation of life, paying attention to the u…
A God-Tier Larp? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins o…
Mapping Interfacial Regimes of Control: A Qualitative Analysis of America’s Post-9/11 Security Technology Infrastructure
Recent technological advancements in surveillance and data analysis software have drastically transformed how the United States manages its immigration and national security systems. In particular, an increased emphasis on information sharing and predictive threat modeling following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has prompted agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security to acquire powerful data analysis software from private…
Google Maps’ Covid-19 layer as an interface for pandemic life
The paper explores Google Maps' COVID-19 layer, a special feature launched by the cartographic platform in September 2020, and shut down two years later. Through the reading of promotional corporate blogposts and interfacial analysis of the layer, it critiques the layers' mediation of the pandemic, caught between public health needs and Google's overarching ethos. The analysis underscores three central claims: that interfacial choices endemic to …
Between two hypes: Will “big data” help unravel blind spots in understanding the “global land rush?”
Time for mapping: Cartographic temporalities
The digital era has brought about huge transformations in the map itself, which to date have been largely conceptualised in spatial terms. Novel objects, forms, processes and approaches have emerged and pose new, pressing questions about the temporality of digital maps and contemporary mapping practices: in spite of its implicit spatiality, digital mapping is strongly grounded in time. This collection brings time back into the map, taking up Dore…
Infrastructural surveillance
This article proposes a new model of privacy: infrastructural surveillance. It departs from Agre’s classic distinction between surveillance and capture by examining the sociotechnical claims of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as requiring totalising surveillance of passengers and environment in order to operate. By doing so, it contributes to the ongoing debate on the commodification and platformisation of life, paying attention to the u…
Re-Valuing Platforms, Reclaiming the Local
This panel brings together emerging scholarship that challenges the contemporary hold of major platforms over public and private life. It critically questions the scope, valence, and embeddedness of platforms in the everyday, challenging (commercial) platformization as the new normal. We attempt to offer new ways of managing, changing and co-opting platforms for the benefit of end-users rather than proprietors only. To this end, the panel discuss…
Temporal Frames for Platform Publics: The Platformization of Breadtube
In this paper we suggest the notion of $2 to account for the intermingling of socio-technical processes that make online platforms (in this case: YouTube) resistant to stable definitions. It has been over a decade of YouTube studies and yet, a consensus on what precisely YouTube is seems unlikely. Arguably, Burgess and Green began this ontological quest with the first edition of YouTube (2008) in which they set out ‘to work through some of the of…
Mapping Interfacial Regimes of Control: A Qualitative Analysis of America’s Post-9/11 Security Technology Infrastructure
Recent technological advancements in surveillance and data analysis software have drastically transformed how the United States manages its immigration and national security systems. In particular, an increased emphasis on information sharing and predictive threat modeling following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has prompted agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security to acquire powerful data analysis software from private…
Cloud Culture: Fluid Memories on Platform Enclosures
This paper brings together emerging work on the platformisation of cultural production (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Duffy, Poell, and Nieborg 2019) with (critical) approaches to digital archiving (Berry 2016; Brügger 2018; Ben-David 2019) and algorithmic curation (Noble 2018; Amoore 2020) to explore a proposed emerging ‘cloud culture’. The term encompasses (1) the technological capacity to modify cultural commodities after they have reached (and perh…
Against Game Studies
The article explores the limitations of the current scholarly game studies (GS) field. Its central presuppositions are (1) that there are certain attributes broadly understood as “GS” by those writing in or adjacent to the field; (2) that those attributes are historically rooted in an attempt to disassociate videogames from other types of electronic (and later—digital) media; and that (3) the preconditions that have led to this split are currentl…
Playing Politics: How Sabarimala Played Out on TikTok
TikTok is commonly known as a playful, silly platform where teenagers share 15-second videos of crazy stunts or act out funny snippets from popular culture. In the past few years, it has experienced exponential growth and popularity, unseating Facebook as the most downloaded app. Interestingly, recent news coverage notes the emergence of TikTok as a political actor in the Indian context. They raise concerns over the abundance of divisive content,…
The Industry of Landlords: Exploring the Assetization of the Triple-A Game
The monetization of the modern Triple-A game has undergone severe changes, as free-to-play revenue models and game as a service distribution strategy have become standard for game developers. To date, the established tradition of the industry’s political–economic analysis focused on the value extraction and user exploitation of video game as a cultural commodity, centered on the video game as generating value through the selling of boxed or digit…
Google Maps’ Covid-19 layer as an interface for pandemic life
The paper explores Google Maps' COVID-19 layer, a special feature launched by the cartographic platform in September 2020, and shut down two years later. Through the reading of promotional corporate blogposts and interfacial analysis of the layer, it critiques the layers' mediation of the pandemic, caught between public health needs and Google's overarching ethos. The analysis underscores three central claims: that interfacial choices endemic to …
Vladdydaddy on Tiktok: Imagined Intimacy and Memetic Participation in Times of War
Vladdydaddy is a popular internet meme that emerged during the 2016 elections in the United States on 4chan and Twitter to characterize the perceived submissive behavior of Donald Trump towards Vladimir Putin. The meme re-emerged on TikTok in the days leading to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, gaining a new meaning. This paper is part of a larger research project with the objective of identifying and scrutinizing various forms o…
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…
A God-Tier Larp? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins o…
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…
In the Shadow of LLMS: Trouble in the “Smart” Automotive Industry
This paper explores the tumultuous landscape of the modern automotive industry, once heralded as the epitome of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications through the promise of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The introduction of large language models (LLMs), notably with ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, marked a turning point, casting shadows over the ambitious goals set by major tech and automotive players. …
Scaling Ai in the Cloud: The Disruption of “Cloudification” in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles
This paper examines the case of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)—cars integrating “smart” digital components—to explore how “cloudification” has emerged as a key infrastructural transformation in the industrialization of AI. CAVs illustrate the “industrialization” of AI as it moves beyond specialized applications to acquire infrastructural characteristics across multiple industries. The paper builds upon insights from three fields: platfo…
Infrastructural hubris and platform power: The failed scalability of Google Stadia
This article examines Google Stadia, a cloud gaming platform that closed in 2023 after less than four years despite being built on Google’s global infrastructure. Through a thematic analysis of 170 documents including specialized press articles, Reddit discussions, and YouTube reviews, we investigate Stadia’s failure by examining its main stakeholders’ perspectives, i.e., gamers and game developers. Drawing on infrastructure studies’ focus on bre…
Driving the hype: LLMs as ‘general-purpose’ promise in the autonomous vehicle industry
Proponents of autonomous vehicles are proclaiming a new era, driven by innovations derived from large language models (LLMs). Following a decade of highly public failures and the concurrent redirection of capital and attention towards generative AI, firms in the autonomous vehicle industry have turned to LLM-style techniques as the basis for a rebooted commercialisation effort. Through a technographic analysis of an annual industry event, Nvidia …
Orchestrating scalability: How patents render cloud imaginaries in CAV innovation
This article explores how cloud computing enables and shapes the scaling of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), positioning cloud infrastructure as a technology, strategy, and imaginary central to the scaling of AI. Using a dataset of 69,421 global patent families, we analyse how diverse actors—including automotive manufacturers, chipmakers, electronics companies, autonomous vehicle firms, and telecom/mapping providers—mobilise cloud techno…
Computer Science (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Business (6 works) · Digital Games and Media (6 works) · Media studies (6 works) · Cloud computing (5 works) · Computer security (4 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (4 works)