Claudia Cantale is a digital sociologist and lecturer in sociology of mass communication and digital media at the Università di Catania. Her research focuses on digital cultures, using digital methods and tools, with a particular preference for ethnographic approaches. Her main areas of investigation concern the consequences of platform capitalism on the practices of digital communities and on digital youth cultures. Among her publications are Gli Uomini e i testi. Un approccio sociologico alla lettura e alla scrittura (Ledizioni, 2019) and Romance e Social Reading. Comunità in rete tra piattaforme e algoritmi (Carocci, 2024). More recently, her scientific interests have developed along two main lines of research: one devoted to the relationship between the neoliberal logics of digital platforms and digital activism; the other more closely related to the imaginaries of cultural production, examined through a critical perspective on sexual capital.
Guido Anselmi is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Catania, where he teaches cultural, digital, and globalization sociology. His research focuses on the social and cultural impacts of digital technologies, with particular attention to platform capitalism, the imaginaries that sustain it, and digital and computational methods for sociological analysis. He has authored two books on digital methods: one on the political and epistemological dimensions of platforms, and the other on the transformation of consumer culture through platformization. He is currently working on two projects: one on GenAI, examined from the perspectives of political economy and research methods; the other on platform imaginaries as symbolic resources that contribute to platforms’ monopolistic power.
Irene Di Mauro collaborates with the University of Catania, where she conducts research in the fields of critical studies of artificial intelligence. Her work focuses on the analysis of gender and ethnic bias in generative AI systems, with particular attention to the ways in which algorithmic infrastructures reproduce social and cultural inequalities through seemingly neutral datasets and language models.
This paper examines memory as a practice of resistance within platform capitalism, where the production and storage of data function as instruments of control and epistemic inequality. The first section explores how artificial intelligence, far from being neutral, reflects and amplifies the power structures of cognitive capitalism, producing new forms of algorithmic colonization (Birhane, 2020; Crawford, 2021). In this perspective, memory is no longer a neutral repository but a field of symbolic struggle: its decolonization requires rethinking datasets, hierarchies of knowledge, and the narratives they encode.The second section focuses on the work of African American artist Stephanie Dinkins, who, through projects such as Not the Only One, employs artificial intelligence to restore voice and memory to Afro-descendant communities. Her artivist practice builds counter-archives that give rise to algorithmic posthumous subjectivities endowed with agency, proposing a situated and affective use of data as a form of digital memory activism. Dinkins demonstrates how technology can be reclaimed to subvert the extractive logics of algorithmic systems and to generate a decolonial imaginary of artificial intelligence.
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