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In May 2019, the "Automation and Me" event invited digital artists from around the world to come together in an unused shopping center unit in the heart of Leeds, United Kingdom, to critically respond to and explore the themes of automation, embodiment, and identity. In this article, we draw on Tobias Matzner's argument that what algorithms are and do "emerges in a complex interplay of social practices, material properties, discourses, mathematical abstractions, code" to think through the event. In so doing, we explore a number of complex interplays as they were felt and lived by all of us who participated in it. We reflect on the experiences during the workshops through the particular framework of automation and feminist new materialism to explore how AI technologies and the complex surveillance of the smart environment replicated, on the one hand, existing and oppressive prejudice and, on the other hand, worked to constantly recalibrate and manipulate the context that humans and nonhumans navigate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the tensions apparent in anonymous military online forums as sites of publicly visible yet discursively intimate performances of military identity and sites of distinct power relations. This article draws on data collected from British military forums and the organisations that own and manage them. We consider the discursive online practices within the forums and the extent to which the technological affordances of 'anonymity' (or what we define as pseudonymity) act as a critical interface between the military community who contribute to the content and nonmilitary observers who read, access, mine and appropriate the content. In so doing, we raise critical questions about the nature of 'anonymity' and the complex tensions in and negotiations of private and public, visibility and invisibility that occur through it and the framing and monetising of particular online communities for economic and political purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on empirical research with NEET populations (16–24-year-olds not in education, employment or training) in the U.K. in order to engage with issues around identification, data and metrics produced through datalogical systems. Our aim is to bridge contemporary discourses around data, digital bureaucracy and datalogical systems with empirical material drawn from a long-term ethnographic project with NEET groups in Leeds, U.K. in order to highlight the way datalogical systems ideologically and politically shape people’s lives. We argue that NEET is a long-standing data category that does work and has resonance within wider datalogical systems. Secondly, that these systems are decision-making and far from benign. They have real impact on people’s lives – not just in a straightforwardly, but in obscure, complex and uneven ways which makes the potential for disruption or intervention increasingly problematic. Finally, these datalogical systems also implicate and are generated by us, even as we seek to critique them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and that mobility is positive and agential – is called into question. Our aim is not only to unpack a number of concepts and assumptions underpinning the mobile phone but also to suggest that these concepts unhelpfully (and even detrimentally) locate mobile phones in relation to the technological possibilities on offer without taking into account what is simultaneously made impossible and immobile, and for whom. Finally, when we set the digital experiences of NEETs alongside the discourses around mobile phones, we find that mobility is restricted – not enabling, and that it is forged in, and articulated as part of an everyday life that is dominated by the social and economic horizons set by the groups status as NEET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]