Digital Tendencies: Intuition, Algorithmic Thought and New Social Movements

With the rise of new digital, smart and algorithmic technologies, it is claimed, ‘the human’ is being fundamentally re-mediated. For some, this is problematic: digitally colonised by capitalism at the level of gesture, affect and habit, it is argued, we are now increasingly politically disaffected. There are also, however, more hopeful socio-political visions: Michel Serres (2015), for example, argues that, in delegating habits of mental processing and synthesising to digital technologies, millennials have honed cognitive conditions for a more ‘intuitive’ mode of being-in-the-world. While there is no necessary link between intuition and progressive social transformation, there are, this essay argues, significant resonances between the ‘intuitive digital subjects’ that Serres imagines and the logics and sensibilities of new networked social movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Vitally enabled by digital technologies, these activisms combine a tendency to oppose exploitation and oppression with a capacity to sense change as it is happening and thus remain radically open to alternative futures.