Luke Munn
Biographic Data
| ID | 296713 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Luke Munn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Luke |
| FAMILY NAME | Munn |
| SIGNATURE | MUNN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1018-7433 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Other worlds: Using AI to revisit Cybersyn and rethink economic futures
Taming the Algo: Grab Bikers Grappling With Platform Logics From Below
How do workers conceptualize a platform’s algorithm and adjust their practices to its logic? To pursue this question, we draw on an ethnography of Grab, the leading rideshare platform in Southeast Asia, composed of 60+ trips talking to drivers on the back of bikes in Hanoi, and in-depth interviews with 10 drivers. From this rich material, we identify a strategic cluster of practices that we term “taming the algorithm.” Taming requires three key m…
Tell me a story: A framework for critically investigating AI language models
Large language models are rapidly being rolled out into high-stakes fields like healthcare, law, and education.However, understanding of their design considerations, operational logics, and implicit biases remains limited.How might these black boxes be understood and unpacked?In this article, we lay out an accessible but critical framework for inquiry, a pedagogical tool with four dimensions.Tell me your story investigates the design and values o…
Culture machine: How MetaCLIP codifies culture
How is the cultural made computational? CLIP models are a recent artificial intelligence (AI) innovation which train on massive amounts of Internet data in order to align language and image, deploying this ‘grasp’ of cultural concepts to understand prompts, classify images and carry out tasks. To critically investigate this cultural codification, we explore MetaCLIP, a recent variation developed by Meta. We analyse the model’s metadata, a single …
The five tests: Designing and evaluating AI according to indigenous Māori principles
As AI technologies are increasingly deployed in work, welfare, healthcare, and other domains, there is a growing realization not only of their power but of their problems. AI has the capacity to reinforce historical injustice, to amplify labor precarity, and to cement forms of racial and gendered inequality. An alternate set of values, paradigms, and priorities are urgently needed. How might we design and evaluate AI from an indigenous perspectiv…
Truth machines: Synthesizing veracity in AI language models
As AI technologies are rolled out into healthcare, academia, human resources, law, and a multitude of other domains, they become de-facto arbiters of truth. But truth is highly contested, with many different definitions and approaches. This article discusses the struggle for truth in AI systems and the general responses to date. It then investigates the production of truth in InstructGPT, a large language model, highlighting how data harvesting, …
Who Wrote This: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing by Naomi Baron (review)
Expansive and Invasive: Mapping the “Bossware” Used to Monitor Workers
“Bossware” is software that monitors workers, tracking their activity and productivity in often hidden ways. This type of software has seen a surge of interest since the start of the pandemic, as managers attempt to retain oversight of workers in remote or distributed conditions. However, “bossware” is not monolithic but highly differentiated, with each product created by specific companies, with specific affordances, for specific purposes. This …
Misinformation’s missing human
From pandemics to political campaigns, online misinformation has become acute. In response, a plethora of interventions have been offered, from debunking and prebunking to fact-checking and labeling. While the technical efficacy of these “solutions” are debatable, I suggest a more fundamental failure: they rely on a humanlike caricature, a rational and ethical figure who only needs better facts to disavow misguided misinfo practices. Instead I ar…
Taming the algorithm: The platform realism of GrabBike delivery workers
How do workers conceptualize a platform’s algorithm and adjust their practices to its logic? To pursue this question, we draw on an ethnography of Grab, the leading rideshare platform in Southeast Asia, composed of 60+ trips talking to drivers on the back of bikes, and 10 in-depth interviews. We identify a distinct set of moves that workers perform to survive on the platform, a strategic cluster of practices we term “taming the algorithm.” These …
(Re)framing built heritage through the machinic gaze
Built heritage has been both subject and product of a gaze that has been sustained through moments of colonial fixation on ruins and monuments, technocratic examination and representation, and fetishisation by a global tourist industry. We argue that the recent proliferation of machine learning and vision technologies create new scopic regimes for heritage: storing and retrieving existing images from vast digital archives, and further imparting t…
The uselessness of AI ethics
As the awareness of AI’s power and danger has risen, the dominant response has been a turn to ethical principles. A flood of AI guidelines and codes of ethics have been released in both the public and private sector in the last several years. However, these are meaningless principles which are contested or incoherent, making them difficult to apply; they are isolated principles situated in an industry and education system which largely ignores et…
Tika technology: An Alternative Blueprint for Digitalisation
Digitalisation has the capacity to radically transform the nature of work, redefining tasks, requirements and remuneration. Yet technologies have often been used to reduce worker autonomy, exacerbate racial and gendered inequality and intensify labour precarity. How can digitalisation instead support emancipatory labour conditions? This article introduces the concept of ‘tika technology’, drawing together scholarship on convivial tools, appropria…
Toxic play: Examining the issue of hate within gaming
This article examines the problem of hate and toxic behavior in gaming. Videogames have risen to become a dominant cultural form, seeing significant increases in players, playtime, and revenue. More people are playing games than ever before, broadening “gamers” into a highly diverse demographic. Yet this rise has been accompanied by a growing recognition of the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of harassment taking place on these platfo…
Technical Territories: Data, Subjects, and Spaces in Infrastructural Asia
The End of Prediction? AI Technologies in a No-Analog World
AI technologies mine past data to anticipate future events, and yet our world of environmental and political crisis ushers in unprecedented conditions. Mixing examples of operational environments (AI in the oil and gas industry) with insights from media, cultural, and environmental studies, this article explores this grappling with uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, companies strive to internalize the complexity and contingency of the real world…
Structured like a language model: Analysing AI as an automated subject
Drawing from the resources of psychoanalysis and critical media studies, in this article we develop an analysis of large language models (LLMs) as 'automated subjects'. We argue the intentional fictional projection of subjectivity onto LLMs can yield an alternate frame through which artificial intelligence (AI) behaviour, including its productions of bias and harm, can be analysed. First, we introduce language models, discuss their significance a…
Surface and Sublevel Hate
On the face of it, contemporary "alt-tech" platforms appear more moderate than legacy hate havens. Yet it's also clear that virulent hate in the form of misogyny, white supremacy, and xenophobia has not disappeared. Probing this tension, this article conceptualizes two forms of hate: Surface "Hate" (moderate content that is highly visible and easily accessible) and Sublevel Hate (explicit content that is more marginal and less discernible). These…
Twinned power: Formations of cloud-edge control
From smart vehicles to smart city sensors, the millions of new devices connected over the next few years will generate huge amounts of highly personal data that needs to be processed in real time. Transmitting this data to the cloud, with its centralized data centers and high latency, is both economically and technically unviable. As a result, the industry is moving towards processing data closer to the source, a major shift from the cloud to the…
Automation Is a Myth
For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy , claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the im…
Sustainable Hate: How Gab Built a Durable “Platform for the People”
Background: Gab is a social network and a haven for racism, sexism, and extremism. With accessible design and tech-forward products, this “platform for the people” has surged in popularity. Analysis: This article examines Gab News, analyzing its topics, sources, and platform integration. Its mix of topics creates an expansive world. Its mix of neutral and hyperpartisan sources creates a believable (yet still conservative) world. And its mix of mo…
Dying on Airbnb: Digital infrastructures and deadly spaces
This paper uses two deaths on the accommodation platform Airbnb to consider how the spatial understandings of digital infrastructures can have consequences for mortality. The platform internalizes each home or room as a Listing, a template of variables minimally describing space as a unit of accommodation. This universal schema facilitates both compatibility and scalability. But this generic understanding ignores both the unpredictable agency of …
Countering the Cloud: Thinking with and Against Data Infrastructures
Data and the new oil: Cloud computing’s lubrication of the petrotechnical
Sophisticated modelling and machine learning technologies, underpinned by cloud computing, are increasingly being deployed within the oil and gas industry. As the easy energy pockets of the past dry up, such technologies promise to locate deposits, increase extraction and optimize production. These high-performance computing technologies require vast infrastructures, a requirement that, in the midst of a climate crisis, has seen a new alliance be…
More than a mob: Parler as preparatory media for the U.S. Capitol storming
On 6 January 2021, a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol. Yet while mob suggests a chaotic and fragmented crowd, networked media had already been working to provide it with “just enough” cohesion, transforming it into a more dangerous political body. This article conceptualizes this preparatory media by examining the “free speech” social media network Parler, drawing on a corpus of ∼350,000 posts from the days leading up to and includi…
Red territory: Forging infrastructural power
Territorial power is enacted and contested through technical infrastructures. From financing submarine cables to constructing hyperscale data facilities and claiming 5G patents, Chinese technology firms such as Huawei have steadily assembled layers of informational architecture. The paper investigates these layers through the lens of the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate in Hong Kong. By tracing its construction, charting its connections and mappin…
Structured like a language model: Analysing AI as an automated subject
Drawing from the resources of psychoanalysis and critical media studies, in this article we develop an analysis of large language models (LLMs) as 'automated subjects'. We argue the intentional fictional projection of subjectivity onto LLMs can yield an alternate frame through which artificial intelligence (AI) behaviour, including its productions of bias and harm, can be analysed. First, we introduce language models, discuss their significance a…
Thinking through silicon: Cables and servers as epistemic infrastructures
Data centers and undersea cables allow information to be transmitted, stored, and processed. Yet, more than passively housing knowledge, information infrastructures actively shape knowledge. Infrastructures facilitate a certain use case, privileging some forms of knowledge while ignoring others. And infrastructures are material investments by states or corporations at a particular site, solidifying their knowledge-production, while marginalizing …
Taming the algorithm: The platform realism of GrabBike delivery workers
How do workers conceptualize a platform’s algorithm and adjust their practices to its logic? To pursue this question, we draw on an ethnography of Grab, the leading rideshare platform in Southeast Asia, composed of 60+ trips talking to drivers on the back of bikes, and 10 in-depth interviews. We identify a distinct set of moves that workers perform to survive on the platform, a strategic cluster of practices we term “taming the algorithm.” These …
Misinformation’s missing human
From pandemics to political campaigns, online misinformation has become acute. In response, a plethora of interventions have been offered, from debunking and prebunking to fact-checking and labeling. While the technical efficacy of these “solutions” are debatable, I suggest a more fundamental failure: they rely on a humanlike caricature, a rational and ethical figure who only needs better facts to disavow misguided misinfo practices. Instead I ar…
(Re)framing built heritage through the machinic gaze
Built heritage has been both subject and product of a gaze that has been sustained through moments of colonial fixation on ruins and monuments, technocratic examination and representation, and fetishisation by a global tourist industry. We argue that the recent proliferation of machine learning and vision technologies create new scopic regimes for heritage: storing and retrieving existing images from vast digital archives, and further imparting t…
Porous Territories the Internet beyond Borderless versus Balkanized
If the internet was once viewed as a borderless realm, critics now warn it is in danger of being “balkanized”, splintering into nationalized fragments. Certainly nation-states increasingly see the Internet as “their” internet, a national space to be regulated and actively shaped. The first half of this article charts the technologies that appear to place this vision within reach: data localization, internet shutdowns, and internet filtering. Thes…
Expansive and Invasive: Mapping the “Bossware” Used to Monitor Workers
“Bossware” is software that monitors workers, tracking their activity and productivity in often hidden ways. This type of software has seen a surge of interest since the start of the pandemic, as managers attempt to retain oversight of workers in remote or distributed conditions. However, “bossware” is not monolithic but highly differentiated, with each product created by specific companies, with specific affordances, for specific purposes. This …
Surface and Sublevel Hate
On the face of it, contemporary "alt-tech" platforms appear more moderate than legacy hate havens. Yet it's also clear that virulent hate in the form of misogyny, white supremacy, and xenophobia has not disappeared. Probing this tension, this article conceptualizes two forms of hate: Surface "Hate" (moderate content that is highly visible and easily accessible) and Sublevel Hate (explicit content that is more marginal and less discernible). These…
Dying on Airbnb: Digital infrastructures and deadly spaces
This paper uses two deaths on the accommodation platform Airbnb to consider how the spatial understandings of digital infrastructures can have consequences for mortality. The platform internalizes each home or room as a Listing, a template of variables minimally describing space as a unit of accommodation. This universal schema facilitates both compatibility and scalability. But this generic understanding ignores both the unpredictable agency of …
Injecting failure: Data center infrastructures and the imaginaries of resilience
Data center infrastructures provide a lens for understanding the rise of resilience thinking, for grasping the pragmatism and promise of resilience as approach. Unable to anticipate every threat and lockout every contingency, developers of resilient infrastructure “design in” failure, automate monitoring and maintenance, and build capacity to flexibly adapt to new threats. In enacting resilience in the present, they anticipate possible futures, p…
I am a Driver-Partner
What does it mean to be a worker in the sharing economy? How is this subjectivity produced by the algorithmic performativities infused into these platforms and how, in turn, is this subjectivity negotiated with? To investigate this question, this article examines the particular algorithmic system of Uber, a labour platform which connects passengers with self-employed ‘Driver-Partners’. Using the notion of the machine, it explores the intentions a…
Cash Burning Machine: Uber’s Logic of Planetary Expansion
Uber’s programme of planetary expansion rapidly captures users and integrates cities. Like other platforms, Uber privileges growth at all costs in order to spin up a set of self-reinforcing dynamics like virtuous cycles and network effects. However, drawing on Arrighi, Hobson, and Arendt, Uber can also be understood as a contemporary incarnation of imperialism. Platforms extend their territories in a programme of aggressive expansion rationalized…
Clouded data: Privacy and the promise of encryption
Personal data is highly vulnerable to security exploits, spurring moves to lock it down through encryption, to cryptographically ‘cloud’ it. But personal data is also highly valuable to corporations and states, triggering moves to unlock its insights by relocating it in the cloud. We characterise this twinned condition as ‘clouded data’. Clouded data constructs a political and technological notion of privacy that operates through the intersection…
Alt-right pipeline: Individual journeys to extremism online
The rise of the alt-right as a potent and sometimes violent political force has been well documented. Yet the journey of an individual towards upholding these ideologies is less well understood. Alt-righters are not instantly converted, but rather incrementally nudged along a particular medial pathway. Drawing on video testimonies, chat logs, and other studies, this paper explores the interaction between this alt-right “pipeline” and the psyche o…
Angry by design: Toxic communication and technical architectures
Hate speech and toxic communication online is on the rise. Responses to this issue tend to offer technical (automated) or non-technical (human content moderation) solutions, or see hate speech as a natural product of hateful people. In contrast, this article begins by recognizing platforms as designed environments that support particular practices while discouraging others. In what ways might these design architectures be contributing to polarizi…
Staying at the Edge of Privacy: Edge Computing and Impersonal Extraction
From self-driving cars to smart city sensors, billions of devices will be connected to networks in the next few years. These devices will collect vast amounts of data which needs to be processed in real-time, overwhelming centralized cloud architectures. To address this need, the industry seeks to process data closer to the source, driving a major shift from the cloud to the ‘edge.’ This article critically investigates the privacy implications of…
Porous Territories the Internet beyond Borderless versus Balkanized
If the internet was once viewed as a borderless realm, critics now warn it is in danger of being “balkanized”, splintering into nationalized fragments. Certainly nation-states increasingly see the Internet as “their” internet, a national space to be regulated and actively shaped. The first half of this article charts the technologies that appear to place this vision within reach: data localization, internet shutdowns, and internet filtering. Thes…
Red territory: Forging infrastructural power
Territorial power is enacted and contested through technical infrastructures. From financing submarine cables to constructing hyperscale data facilities and claiming 5G patents, Chinese technology firms such as Huawei have steadily assembled layers of informational architecture. The paper investigates these layers through the lens of the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate in Hong Kong. By tracing its construction, charting its connections and mappin…
Thinking through silicon: Cables and servers as epistemic infrastructures
Data centers and undersea cables allow information to be transmitted, stored, and processed. Yet, more than passively housing knowledge, information infrastructures actively shape knowledge. Infrastructures facilitate a certain use case, privileging some forms of knowledge while ignoring others. And infrastructures are material investments by states or corporations at a particular site, solidifying their knowledge-production, while marginalizing …
Injecting failure: Data center infrastructures and the imaginaries of resilience
Data center infrastructures provide a lens for understanding the rise of resilience thinking, for grasping the pragmatism and promise of resilience as approach. Unable to anticipate every threat and lockout every contingency, developers of resilient infrastructure “design in” failure, automate monitoring and maintenance, and build capacity to flexibly adapt to new threats. In enacting resilience in the present, they anticipate possible futures, p…
From the Black Atlantic to Black-Scholes
Rather than being unprecedented, contemporary technologies are the most sophisticated instances of a long-standing dream: if space could be more comprehensively captured and coded, it could be more intensively capitalized. Two moments within this lineage are explored: maritime insurance of slave ships in the eighteenth century, and the Black-Scholes model of option pricing from the twentieth century. Maritime insurance rendered the unknown space …
Data and the new oil: Cloud computing’s lubrication of the petrotechnical
Sophisticated modelling and machine learning technologies, underpinned by cloud computing, are increasingly being deployed within the oil and gas industry. As the easy energy pockets of the past dry up, such technologies promise to locate deposits, increase extraction and optimize production. These high-performance computing technologies require vast infrastructures, a requirement that, in the midst of a climate crisis, has seen a new alliance be…
More than a mob: Parler as preparatory media for the U.S. Capitol storming
On 6 January 2021, a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol. Yet while mob suggests a chaotic and fragmented crowd, networked media had already been working to provide it with “just enough” cohesion, transforming it into a more dangerous political body. This article conceptualizes this preparatory media by examining the “free speech” social media network Parler, drawing on a corpus of ∼350,000 posts from the days leading up to and includi…
Twinned power: Formations of cloud-edge control
From smart vehicles to smart city sensors, the millions of new devices connected over the next few years will generate huge amounts of highly personal data that needs to be processed in real time. Transmitting this data to the cloud, with its centralized data centers and high latency, is both economically and technically unviable. As a result, the industry is moving towards processing data closer to the source, a major shift from the cloud to the…
Automation Is a Myth
For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy , claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the im…
Sustainable Hate: How Gab Built a Durable “Platform for the People”
Background: Gab is a social network and a haven for racism, sexism, and extremism. With accessible design and tech-forward products, this “platform for the people” has surged in popularity. Analysis: This article examines Gab News, analyzing its topics, sources, and platform integration. Its mix of topics creates an expansive world. Its mix of neutral and hyperpartisan sources creates a believable (yet still conservative) world. And its mix of mo…
Dying on Airbnb: Digital infrastructures and deadly spaces
This paper uses two deaths on the accommodation platform Airbnb to consider how the spatial understandings of digital infrastructures can have consequences for mortality. The platform internalizes each home or room as a Listing, a template of variables minimally describing space as a unit of accommodation. This universal schema facilitates both compatibility and scalability. But this generic understanding ignores both the unpredictable agency of …
Countering the Cloud: Thinking with and Against Data Infrastructures
The uselessness of AI ethics
As the awareness of AI’s power and danger has risen, the dominant response has been a turn to ethical principles. A flood of AI guidelines and codes of ethics have been released in both the public and private sector in the last several years. However, these are meaningless principles which are contested or incoherent, making them difficult to apply; they are isolated principles situated in an industry and education system which largely ignores et…
Tika technology: An Alternative Blueprint for Digitalisation
Digitalisation has the capacity to radically transform the nature of work, redefining tasks, requirements and remuneration. Yet technologies have often been used to reduce worker autonomy, exacerbate racial and gendered inequality and intensify labour precarity. How can digitalisation instead support emancipatory labour conditions? This article introduces the concept of ‘tika technology’, drawing together scholarship on convivial tools, appropria…
Toxic play: Examining the issue of hate within gaming
This article examines the problem of hate and toxic behavior in gaming. Videogames have risen to become a dominant cultural form, seeing significant increases in players, playtime, and revenue. More people are playing games than ever before, broadening “gamers” into a highly diverse demographic. Yet this rise has been accompanied by a growing recognition of the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of harassment taking place on these platfo…
Technical Territories: Data, Subjects, and Spaces in Infrastructural Asia
The End of Prediction? AI Technologies in a No-Analog World
AI technologies mine past data to anticipate future events, and yet our world of environmental and political crisis ushers in unprecedented conditions. Mixing examples of operational environments (AI in the oil and gas industry) with insights from media, cultural, and environmental studies, this article explores this grappling with uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, companies strive to internalize the complexity and contingency of the real world…
Structured like a language model: Analysing AI as an automated subject
Drawing from the resources of psychoanalysis and critical media studies, in this article we develop an analysis of large language models (LLMs) as 'automated subjects'. We argue the intentional fictional projection of subjectivity onto LLMs can yield an alternate frame through which artificial intelligence (AI) behaviour, including its productions of bias and harm, can be analysed. First, we introduce language models, discuss their significance a…
Surface and Sublevel Hate
On the face of it, contemporary "alt-tech" platforms appear more moderate than legacy hate havens. Yet it's also clear that virulent hate in the form of misogyny, white supremacy, and xenophobia has not disappeared. Probing this tension, this article conceptualizes two forms of hate: Surface "Hate" (moderate content that is highly visible and easily accessible) and Sublevel Hate (explicit content that is more marginal and less discernible). These…
Computer Science (25 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Computer security (8 works) · Engineering (7 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (7 works)