Tobias Blanke
Biographic Data
| ID | 292207 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tobias Blanke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tobias |
| FAMILY NAME | Blanke |
| SIGNATURE | BLANKE T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0956-987X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 166 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
An archive of contestation: Digital surveillance and human–machine recompositions of resistance
This article proposes to make sense of the ‘atmosphere of failure’ diagnosed by key players in the mobilisation against mass surveillance in the United Kingdom. Firstly, by entangling oral history interviews and computational analyses of NGO websites, we recompose an archive of contestation that is not temporally limited to the Snowden ‘moment’. We advance the notion of a ‘discordant machine’ to render the generativity of discordances and surpris…
Zones of (un)certainty: Studying the temporal stabilization of ground truths for medical AI
Medical data annotation is a critical yet contingent process that (re)configures ambiguous medical decisions and data representations into ground truths for artificial intelligence (AI). Extending critical data, AI, and STS research on uncertainty in data annotation, this article develops the concept of zones of (un)certainty to capture the epistemic time-spaces through which annotators transform uncertainty and dissonance into stabilized ground-…
Prospective dynamic average and marginal electricity emission factors for Germany until 2070: A methodological extension incorporating energy storage
Making GenAI valuable: Benchmarks, singularities, and the enrichment economy
As investment in Generative AI (GenAI) has reached tens and hundreds of billions, anxieties about an ‘AI bubble’ have been on the rise. This article offers an alternative perspective on how GenAI is made valuable. Drawing on Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre's economy of enrichment, it argues that benchmarks have become devices of GenAI valuation, which make Large Language Models (LLMs) into singular, exceptional and non-standard objects. Benchma…
Making machine learning good enough – studying the political endeavour of finding ‘right’ metrics and thresholds
As machine learning (ML) technologies move from their discrete existence in research to being highly applied technologies across society, critical scholars have begun to address the epistemological conditions that shape the emergence of such systems and their societal implications. In this paper, we investigate a specific epistemological condition of ML, namely, how ML systems rely on ongoing negotiations and agreements of ‘good enough’ to be dep…
Keywords in Digital Humanities – A critical assessment of computational techniques for mapping security and freedom in historical debates
The article investigates the continued importance of keywords in digital humanities and especially their relation to recent machine-learning approaches. Different research practices related to digital humanities agree on the importance of keywords to present issues and/or provide the baseline for new stories about the past, about literature or media. Keywords are useful to target ideas that have no clear definitions and productive in describing c…
AI competitions as infrastructures of power in medical imaging
This article examines how platform-based AI competitions structure power relations in medical imaging research. It focuses on two leading platforms, Kaggle and Grand Challenge, which provide organisational as well as infrastructural support to run AI competitions. In dialogue with critical AI and platform studies research, we investigate how such competitions are organised – under which infrastructural conditions and by whom – and how this shapes…
Reassembling digital archives—strategies for counter-archiving
Archives have long been a key concern of academic debates about truth, memory, recording and power and are important sites for social sciences and humanities research. This has been the case for traditional archives, but these debates have accelerated with the digital transformation of archives. The proliferation of digital tools and the fast-growing increase in digital materials have created very large digitised and born-digital archives. This a…
Algorithmic Reason: Tobias Blanke interviewed by Puspa Damai
Algorithmic Reason: Tobias Blanke interviewed by Puspa Damai
Ai Competitions as Infrastructures: Examining Power Relations on Kaggle and Grand Challenge in Ai-Driven Medical Imaging
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly being taken-up across scientific disciplines, medical imaging is no exception. To stimulate development and facilitate the scientific evaluation of new approaches, AI-based research in medical imaging is increasingly organised in a competitive manner through digital machine-learning development platforms such as Kaggle and Grand Challenge—two of the leading platforms in the field. For medical image analysis…
Making Data Visualizations, Contesting Security: Digital Humanities Meet International Relations
This article brings debates about data visualization in digital humanities in conversation with critical security studies and international relations. Building on feminist approaches in digital humanities, we explore the potential and limitations of data visualization as a critical method for research on (in)security. We unpack three aspects of making data visualizations by specifying “making” in this context as working, orienting, and critiquing…
Ethics
The language of ethics has increasingly informed calls for the regulation of big data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI). In this chapter, we analyse a series of initiatives by state, supra-state, tech, and civil society actors to deploy ethical principles and codes as ways of ‘conducting the conduct’ of developers, engineers, and companies. We argue that ethicizing algorithms has become a form of pre-empting dissensus. In contrast to …
Platforms
This chapter investigates how algorithmic reason becomes materialized in the infrastructure of digital platforms. While the literature on platforms has focused on data extraction, centralization, and new enclosures through monopolization, we argue that platform power emerges from the work of decomposing and recomposing small and large forms, inside and outside. With movements of externalization and internalization, platforms have become the centr…
Conclusion: Democratic scenes
In the Conclusion, we discuss the compound political implications of an ascendant algorithmic reason. What vocabularies have become available to us to render the rationalities and materializations of algorithmic reason? How can algorithmic reason be politicized? Even as the conditions of political action become more limiting through algorithmic reason, we argue that frictions, refusals, and resistances can reconfigure political interventions in t…
Value
Analyses of digital capitalism, data capitalism, platform capitalism, and surveillance capitalism are underpinned by controversies over the economic value of data. In this chapter, we investigate different approaches to value and valorization. We take a scene of controversy around Spotify as an inquiry into the conjunction of digital production and surveillance as well as emerging new forms of valorization. Expanding this scene through an analysi…
Decision
How do algorithms make decisions, how do they draw lines of difference? Mobilizing the lesser-known critical theory of Günther Anders, this chapter argues that we need to approach algorithmic decision-making through the prism of production and distributed human-machine work. To this end, we develop a methodology to ‘follow an algorithm’ marketed by CivicScape, a predictive policing company. Algorithmic decisions emerge via geometrical calculation…
International
Questions about the international have emerged around the power of big tech companies: Google attempting to access the Chinese market, Facebook providing digital infrastructures in Africa. Starting from the problem of drawing borders and boundaries as constitutive of the international, we analyse how states attempt to render algorithms governable by redrawing sovereign boundaries and creating legal regulations for the content that social media co…
Others
This chapter investigates the algorithmic production of potentially dangerous ‘others’. Starting from the public scene opened by the case of the Al Jazeera journalist Ahmad Zaidan, wrongly identified by the SKYNET programme of the US National Security Agency as a suspect terrorist, we show how others are produced as ‘anomalies’ at the intersection of machine-learning algorithms and security practices. Methodologically, there were numerous limits …
Knowledge
From the ‘needle in a haystack’ to microtargeting, big data and its algorithmic operations have produced new modes of knowledge for the government of individuals and populations. Big data has sparked much anxiety about the ways in which traditional modes of knowledge have been unsettled or even undone. Starting from the scene of the Cambridge Analytica scandal about the use of digital data in elections around the world, the first chapter explores…
Accountability
As facial recognition is increasingly deployed around the world, from the US to China, civil liberties activists and democratic actors have drawn attention to its error rates and privacy invasions. The chapter unpacks new facets of algorithmic accountability, as it emerged nationally and transnationally by producing accounts of algorithmic error and by providing trustworthy explanations of what algorithms do. An algorithmic accountability and aud…
Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other
Are algorithms ruling the world today? Is artificial intelligence making life-and-death decisions? Are social media companies able to manipulate elections? As we are confronted with public and academic anxieties about unprecedented changes, this book offers a different analytical prism to investigate these transformations as more mundane and fraught. Aradau and Blanke develop conceptual and methodological tools to understand how algorithmic opera…
Neither opaque nor transparent: A transdisciplinary methodology to investigate datafication at the EU borders
In 2020, the European Union announced the award of the contract for the biometric part of the new database for border control, the Entry Exit System, to two companies: IDEMIA and Sopra Steria. Both companies had been previously involved in the development of databases for border and migration management. While there has been a growing amount of publicly available documents that show what kind of technologies are being implemented, for how much mo…
Algorithmic Surveillance and the Political Life of Error
Concerns with errors, mistakes, and inaccuracies have shaped political debates about what technologies do, where and how certain technologies can be used, and for which purposes. However, error has received scant attention in the emerging field of ignorance studies. In this article, we analyze how errors have been mobilized in scientific and public controversies over surveillance technologies. In juxtaposing nineteenth-century debates about the e…
On machine vision and photographic imagination
In this article we introduce the concept of implied optical perspective in deep learning computer vision systems. Taking the BBC's experimental television programme “Made by Machine: When AI met the Archive” (2018) as a case study, we trace a conceptual and material link between the system used to automatically “watch” the television archive and a specific type of photographic practice. From a computational aesthetics perspective, we show how dee…
Computational genealogy: Continuities and discontinuities in the political rhetoric of US presidents
Articulations of discontinuity and moments of dissent have been central to critical historical work. However, such vocabularies and analyses of historical change have received less attention in the emerging field of digital methods. Digital methods based on discerning patterns have focused on continuities, while discontinuities and ruptures have been derivative of trends and patterns. By contrast, genealogical methods attend to the entanglement o…
Politics of prediction: Security and the time/space of governmentality in the age of big data
From 'connecting the dots' and finding 'the needle in the haystack' to predictive policing and data mining for counterinsurgency, security professionals have increasingly adopted the language and methods of computing for the purposes of prediction. Digital devices and big data appear to offer answers to a wide array of problems of (in)security by promising insights into unknown futures. This article investigates the transformation of prediction t…
Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other
Are algorithms ruling the world today? Is artificial intelligence making life-and-death decisions? Are social media companies able to manipulate elections? As we are confronted with public and academic anxieties about unprecedented changes, this book offers a different analytical prism to investigate these transformations as more mundane and fraught. Aradau and Blanke develop conceptual and methodological tools to understand how algorithmic opera…
The (Big) Data-security assemblage: Knowledge and critique
The Snowden revelations and the emergence of 'Big Data' have rekindled questions about how security practices are deployed in a digital age and with what political effects. While critical scholars have drawn attention to the social, political and legal challenges to these practices, the debates in computer and information science have received less analytical attention. This paper proposes to take seriously the critical knowledge developed in inf…
Governing others: Anomaly and the algorithmic subject of security
As digital technologies and algorithmic rationalities have increasingly reconfigured security practices, critical scholars have drawn attention to their performative effects on the temporality of law, notions of rights, and understandings of subjectivity. This article proposes to explore how the ‘other’ is made knowable in massive amounts of data and how the boundary between self and other is drawn algorithmically. It argues that algorithmic secu…
Hacking the social life of Big Data
This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. …
Acts of digital parasitism: Hacking, humanitarian apps and platformisation
The opacity of digital technologies has posed significant challenges for critical research and digital methods. In response, controversy mapping, reverse engineering and hacking have been key methodological devices to grapple with opacity and ‘open the black box’ of digital ecosystems. We take recent developments in digital humanitarianism and the accelerated production of apps for refugees following the 2015 Mediterranean refugee crisis as a sit…
Neither opaque nor transparent: A transdisciplinary methodology to investigate datafication at the EU borders
In 2020, the European Union announced the award of the contract for the biometric part of the new database for border control, the Entry Exit System, to two companies: IDEMIA and Sopra Steria. Both companies had been previously involved in the development of databases for border and migration management. While there has been a growing amount of publicly available documents that show what kind of technologies are being implemented, for how much mo…
The Material Conditions of Platforms: Monopolization Through Decentralization
In this article, we add research on technical integration and dependency to the theories of platformization. Our research seeks to understand how platforms have been able to technically integrate themselves into the fabric of the mobile ecosystem, transforming the economic dynamics that allow these largely enclosed entities to compete. We therefore want to consider platforms as service assemblages to account for the material ways in which they ha…
Computational genealogy: Continuities and discontinuities in the political rhetoric of US presidents
Articulations of discontinuity and moments of dissent have been central to critical historical work. However, such vocabularies and analyses of historical change have received less attention in the emerging field of digital methods. Digital methods based on discerning patterns have focused on continuities, while discontinuities and ruptures have been derivative of trends and patterns. By contrast, genealogical methods attend to the entanglement o…
Making Data Visualizations, Contesting Security: Digital Humanities Meet International Relations
This article brings debates about data visualization in digital humanities in conversation with critical security studies and international relations. Building on feminist approaches in digital humanities, we explore the potential and limitations of data visualization as a critical method for research on (in)security. We unpack three aspects of making data visualizations by specifying “making” in this context as working, orienting, and critiquing…
The (Big) Data-security assemblage: Knowledge and critique
The Snowden revelations and the emergence of 'Big Data' have rekindled questions about how security practices are deployed in a digital age and with what political effects. While critical scholars have drawn attention to the social, political and legal challenges to these practices, the debates in computer and information science have received less analytical attention. This paper proposes to take seriously the critical knowledge developed in inf…
Hacking the social life of Big Data
This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. …
Governing others: Anomaly and the algorithmic subject of security
As digital technologies and algorithmic rationalities have increasingly reconfigured security practices, critical scholars have drawn attention to their performative effects on the temporality of law, notions of rights, and understandings of subjectivity. This article proposes to explore how the ‘other’ is made knowable in massive amounts of data and how the boundary between self and other is drawn algorithmically. It argues that algorithmic secu…
Politics of prediction: Security and the time/space of governmentality in the age of big data
From 'connecting the dots' and finding 'the needle in the haystack' to predictive policing and data mining for counterinsurgency, security professionals have increasingly adopted the language and methods of computing for the purposes of prediction. Digital devices and big data appear to offer answers to a wide array of problems of (in)security by promising insights into unknown futures. This article investigates the transformation of prediction t…
Acts of digital parasitism: Hacking, humanitarian apps and platformisation
The opacity of digital technologies has posed significant challenges for critical research and digital methods. In response, controversy mapping, reverse engineering and hacking have been key methodological devices to grapple with opacity and ‘open the black box’ of digital ecosystems. We take recent developments in digital humanitarianism and the accelerated production of apps for refugees following the 2015 Mediterranean refugee crisis as a sit…
The Material Conditions of Platforms: Monopolization Through Decentralization
In this article, we add research on technical integration and dependency to the theories of platformization. Our research seeks to understand how platforms have been able to technically integrate themselves into the fabric of the mobile ecosystem, transforming the economic dynamics that allow these largely enclosed entities to compete. We therefore want to consider platforms as service assemblages to account for the material ways in which they ha…
Algorithmic Surveillance and the Political Life of Error
Concerns with errors, mistakes, and inaccuracies have shaped political debates about what technologies do, where and how certain technologies can be used, and for which purposes. However, error has received scant attention in the emerging field of ignorance studies. In this article, we analyze how errors have been mobilized in scientific and public controversies over surveillance technologies. In juxtaposing nineteenth-century debates about the e…
On machine vision and photographic imagination
In this article we introduce the concept of implied optical perspective in deep learning computer vision systems. Taking the BBC's experimental television programme “Made by Machine: When AI met the Archive” (2018) as a case study, we trace a conceptual and material link between the system used to automatically “watch” the television archive and a specific type of photographic practice. From a computational aesthetics perspective, we show how dee…
Computational genealogy: Continuities and discontinuities in the political rhetoric of US presidents
Articulations of discontinuity and moments of dissent have been central to critical historical work. However, such vocabularies and analyses of historical change have received less attention in the emerging field of digital methods. Digital methods based on discerning patterns have focused on continuities, while discontinuities and ruptures have been derivative of trends and patterns. By contrast, genealogical methods attend to the entanglement o…
Ethics
The language of ethics has increasingly informed calls for the regulation of big data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI). In this chapter, we analyse a series of initiatives by state, supra-state, tech, and civil society actors to deploy ethical principles and codes as ways of ‘conducting the conduct’ of developers, engineers, and companies. We argue that ethicizing algorithms has become a form of pre-empting dissensus. In contrast to …
Platforms
This chapter investigates how algorithmic reason becomes materialized in the infrastructure of digital platforms. While the literature on platforms has focused on data extraction, centralization, and new enclosures through monopolization, we argue that platform power emerges from the work of decomposing and recomposing small and large forms, inside and outside. With movements of externalization and internalization, platforms have become the centr…
Conclusion: Democratic scenes
In the Conclusion, we discuss the compound political implications of an ascendant algorithmic reason. What vocabularies have become available to us to render the rationalities and materializations of algorithmic reason? How can algorithmic reason be politicized? Even as the conditions of political action become more limiting through algorithmic reason, we argue that frictions, refusals, and resistances can reconfigure political interventions in t…
Value
Analyses of digital capitalism, data capitalism, platform capitalism, and surveillance capitalism are underpinned by controversies over the economic value of data. In this chapter, we investigate different approaches to value and valorization. We take a scene of controversy around Spotify as an inquiry into the conjunction of digital production and surveillance as well as emerging new forms of valorization. Expanding this scene through an analysi…
Decision
How do algorithms make decisions, how do they draw lines of difference? Mobilizing the lesser-known critical theory of Günther Anders, this chapter argues that we need to approach algorithmic decision-making through the prism of production and distributed human-machine work. To this end, we develop a methodology to ‘follow an algorithm’ marketed by CivicScape, a predictive policing company. Algorithmic decisions emerge via geometrical calculation…
International
Questions about the international have emerged around the power of big tech companies: Google attempting to access the Chinese market, Facebook providing digital infrastructures in Africa. Starting from the problem of drawing borders and boundaries as constitutive of the international, we analyse how states attempt to render algorithms governable by redrawing sovereign boundaries and creating legal regulations for the content that social media co…
Others
This chapter investigates the algorithmic production of potentially dangerous ‘others’. Starting from the public scene opened by the case of the Al Jazeera journalist Ahmad Zaidan, wrongly identified by the SKYNET programme of the US National Security Agency as a suspect terrorist, we show how others are produced as ‘anomalies’ at the intersection of machine-learning algorithms and security practices. Methodologically, there were numerous limits …
Knowledge
From the ‘needle in a haystack’ to microtargeting, big data and its algorithmic operations have produced new modes of knowledge for the government of individuals and populations. Big data has sparked much anxiety about the ways in which traditional modes of knowledge have been unsettled or even undone. Starting from the scene of the Cambridge Analytica scandal about the use of digital data in elections around the world, the first chapter explores…
Accountability
As facial recognition is increasingly deployed around the world, from the US to China, civil liberties activists and democratic actors have drawn attention to its error rates and privacy invasions. The chapter unpacks new facets of algorithmic accountability, as it emerged nationally and transnationally by producing accounts of algorithmic error and by providing trustworthy explanations of what algorithms do. An algorithmic accountability and aud…
Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other
Are algorithms ruling the world today? Is artificial intelligence making life-and-death decisions? Are social media companies able to manipulate elections? As we are confronted with public and academic anxieties about unprecedented changes, this book offers a different analytical prism to investigate these transformations as more mundane and fraught. Aradau and Blanke develop conceptual and methodological tools to understand how algorithmic opera…
Neither opaque nor transparent: A transdisciplinary methodology to investigate datafication at the EU borders
In 2020, the European Union announced the award of the contract for the biometric part of the new database for border control, the Entry Exit System, to two companies: IDEMIA and Sopra Steria. Both companies had been previously involved in the development of databases for border and migration management. While there has been a growing amount of publicly available documents that show what kind of technologies are being implemented, for how much mo…
Algorithmic Reason: Tobias Blanke interviewed by Puspa Damai
Algorithmic Reason: Tobias Blanke interviewed by Puspa Damai
Ai Competitions as Infrastructures: Examining Power Relations on Kaggle and Grand Challenge in Ai-Driven Medical Imaging
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly being taken-up across scientific disciplines, medical imaging is no exception. To stimulate development and facilitate the scientific evaluation of new approaches, AI-based research in medical imaging is increasingly organised in a competitive manner through digital machine-learning development platforms such as Kaggle and Grand Challenge—two of the leading platforms in the field. For medical image analysis…
Making Data Visualizations, Contesting Security: Digital Humanities Meet International Relations
This article brings debates about data visualization in digital humanities in conversation with critical security studies and international relations. Building on feminist approaches in digital humanities, we explore the potential and limitations of data visualization as a critical method for research on (in)security. We unpack three aspects of making data visualizations by specifying “making” in this context as working, orienting, and critiquing…
Reassembling digital archives—strategies for counter-archiving
Archives have long been a key concern of academic debates about truth, memory, recording and power and are important sites for social sciences and humanities research. This has been the case for traditional archives, but these debates have accelerated with the digital transformation of archives. The proliferation of digital tools and the fast-growing increase in digital materials have created very large digitised and born-digital archives. This a…
Keywords in Digital Humanities – A critical assessment of computational techniques for mapping security and freedom in historical debates
The article investigates the continued importance of keywords in digital humanities and especially their relation to recent machine-learning approaches. Different research practices related to digital humanities agree on the importance of keywords to present issues and/or provide the baseline for new stories about the past, about literature or media. Keywords are useful to target ideas that have no clear definitions and productive in describing c…
Computer Science (19 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Computer security (9 works) · Data science (8 works) · Global Security and Public Health (7 works) · Big data (6 works)