Book Review: Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power by Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré

It is now widely accepted that we are living in platform capitalism. With this concept, critical scholars define how digital infrastructures and algorithms reshape exploitation through data accumulation and commodification. Yet, the issue of whether disenfranchised groups have more or less agency in online spaces is a matter of contestation. Recent literature has either focused on the pervasiveness of automation as the ultimate frontier of capitalist domination (Fuchs 2020; Kuntsman & Miyake 2022) or on gig-workers as the primary agents of resistance (Della Porta et al. 2023; Woodcock 2021). Bonini and Treré’s (2024) new work, Algorithms of Resistance, makes a decisive contribution to the field. The book is a must-have for critical scholars within and beyond the field of digital studies: the book’s vast overview of acts of resistance to and through algorithms is a unique guide to understanding who and how is challenging big platforms.

Chapter 1, Living with Algorithms, sets the scene for understanding power, agency, and resistance in platform societies. After surveying how big-tech-owned platforms impose their control over gig-workers, creative industries and social media users, Bonini and Treré contend that extant literature overlooks how people do things to algorithms. To make sense of this counter-movement, the authors conceptualize algorithmic agency as ‘the user’s “reflexive ability” to make the algorithms work to meet their own needs’ (p. 19). This is grounds for introducing algorithmic resistance as ordinary and multifaceted acts that may challenge big tech power.

Chapter 2 adopts the perspective of the Moral Economy of Algorithmic Agency to flesh out the book’s analytical framework. The authors argue that economic agents bear specific moral economies. Accordingly, algorithmic ‘acts’ can be understood as either aligned to the platforms’ moral economy (for instance, praising the value of individual competition among influencers on social media) or to users’ moral economy (for example, the cooperation among riders). This first axis is intersected by a second one, which sees algorithmic agency either as strategic, the kind of acts from the top-down to re-direct platforms to seize more power, or tactical, the bottom-up practices of the powerless to contain or challenge the power of algorithms. This analytical map drives empirical research on gig labor, culture, and politics as sites of algorithmic resistance.

Chapter 3, Gaming the Boss, is dedicated to how gig workers (self-)employed by platforms such as Uber or Deliveroo resist or challenge algorithmic exploitation. From Italy to India, from Spain to China, Bonini and Treré map acts of everyday resistance whose goals, rather than revolutionary, are pragmatic improvements. In some cases, these are individual acts of resistance, whereas, in others, tactical agency emerges from collective action. While the authors emphasize that individual acts are not diminished resistance, they highlight how collective agency has expansive effects, as platform workers learn how to resist and game the algorithms.

Chapter 4, Gaming Culture, explores how artists and digital self-entrepreneurs strive to turn the game rules of platforms to their advantage. Examples span from how the K-pop fan communities trick platforms such as Spotify to increase their bands’ visibility to the Instagram Pods, groups whereby micro-influencers bypass platform rules to mutually reinforce their contents’ visibility. These practices, the authors argue, exemplify how even when starting from acts whose moral economies are aligned with platforms (i.e., increasing visibility for profit motives), sharing knowledge to trick the algorithms shapes solidarity among content creators.

Chapter 5 conceptualizes algorithmic politics as the repertoires of actions for ‘appropriating and acting upon algorithms to fulfill [political actors’] political objectives’ (p. 132). This agency is the most contradictory, comprising institutional agency from above and contentious agency from below. While even digital activism from below can take right-wing reactionary forms, the use of algorithms for contentious politics by social movements is of the utmost relevance for the future of algorithmic resistance. These tactical acts, the authors argue, fall into three types of practices: algorithmic amplification, algorithmic evasion, and algorithmic hijacking.

Finally, Chapter 6, Frontiers of Resistance in the Automated Society, reaffirms Bonini and Treré key tenets: even in the case of increased control by platforms through Generative Artificial Intelligence, acts of resistance are there to stay. Resistance in gig labor, culture, and politics constitute an agential ecology whereby everyday practices should not be seen as diminished empowerment. Rather, Bonini and Treré’s argument is that even those tactical acts which do not challenge platform power are shaping cultures of disobedience, which may be the first step, not the solution ‘in a process of awareness-raising among a vast multitude of actors who occupy a position of moderate/extreme weakness or subalternity with regard to platforms’ (p. 176).

The book has two main strengths and one limitation. First, the authors’ main point, from the start to the end, is that for any exploitative power, there has always been and will always be resistance, and there is no reason why platform capitalism should be any different. Not only this optimistic stance is refreshing for readers, but illuminating the comprehensiveness of algorithmic resistance is a convincing perspective to unpack the strengths and contradictions of contentious politics. Second, Bonini and Treré take seriously the need to overcome digital colonialism in critical data studies; the book stems from original research with interviews on a global scale, and this broad scope gives consistency to the authors’ claim to look at the actual desires and processes of socialization from which resistance emerge. However, this grounded and Foucauldian approach comes with some limitations: while the authors make references to the possibility of a counter-hegemony by a digital working class, how these movements may be coming together is overlooked in the book. Crucially, the pejorative attribute of strategic agency and the celebration of tactical acts should be better explored, as this perspective seems to imply that whenever groups can harness resources for their resistance, these must be top-down forms of control. These are stimulating debates that Algorithms of Resistance raise, though: reflecting on the multifaceted forms of resistance from below is urgent to understanding anti-platform capitalist alternatives that are yet to come.