@article{article_1894305, title={Artificial Intelligence, Platform Labor, and Social Control: Algoritarism as a Mode of Rule}, journal={CLAIMS: Eleştirel Yapay Zeka ve Medya Çalışmaları Dergisi}, volume={1}, pages={1–23}, year={2026}, url={https://izlik.org/JA83BM69ZP}, author={Yılmaz, Özgür}, keywords={Artificial Intelligence, Platform Labor, Algorithmic Governance, Decolonizing AI, Digital Colonialism, Platform Capitalism, Data Extraction, Class Struggle}, abstract={<p>This article examines artificial intelligence and platform work as interconnected dimensions of contemporary social control. Moving beyond narratives of technological inevitability, it argues that algorithmic governance constitutes a historically specific mode of rule that reorganizes labor, subjectivity, and global dependency. Within platform economies, AI-driven systems structure work through data extraction, automated evaluation, and continuous profiling, intensifying alienation while extending surplus value production into the realm of data. The promise of flexibility and autonomy conceals algorithmic command, individualized risk, and the normalization of precarious labor trajectories. The analysis is grounded in a decolonizing AI perspective, which interrogates the colonial logics embedded in dominant techno-capitalist imaginaries. AI infrastructures are geographically concentrated, epistemically centered on Anglo-European models, and economically dependent on asymmetrical data flows from the Global South. In this configuration, platform sub-imperialism deepens super-exploitation and integrates peripheral regions into data regimes governed by hegemonic centers. Algorithmic systems thus reproduce global hierarchies not only through material extraction but also through the shaping of socio-technical imaginaries that delimit what can be imagined as a desirable technological future. Methodologically, the article adopts a diffractive approach, reading labor processes, coloniality, affect, infrastructure, and ideology through one another. This enables an account of algorithmic governance as simultaneously managerial technique, ideological apparatus, and socio-technical environment. While AI-mediated control intensifies surveillance and standardization, it remains dependent on collective labor, continuous data production, and material infrastructures. The study concludes that artificial intelligence must be understood as a terrain of class antagonism and geopolitical struggle rather than a neutral innovation, and that contestation over algorithmic governance entails confronting its political-economic foundations as well as its epistemic hierarchies. </p>}, number={1}