c:o/re Fellow 10/25 – 09/26
Tsvetelina Hristova is an anthropologist, critical media studies scholar, and amateur boxer whose interest in social research developed from her involvement in left-wing activism in Bulgaria. Her work explores emerging and alternative forms of governance and control of labor and populations through analysis of the intersections of regimes of technological and political organizing. She has held positions at the Department of Art Media and Technology, Southampton University and the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.
Communist Theory of Data: Political, Economic and Ecological Practices of Datafication in Socialist Bulgaria
In the early 1960s, data emerged as a central concern for the socialist government of Bulgaria. During these last three decades of the Socialist Bloc, communist parties in different Eastern European countries were grappling with a complex problem: How should planned communist economies respond to the new context of capitalist globalization, the rise of computing and information technology, and the detrimental ecological effects of rapid industrialization?
In Bulgaria, this question prompted years of intense discussions and experimentation about the basis and boundaries of a communist planned economy and scientific communism, in which data-informed cybernetic control and technological innovation were seen as a path to transforming the organization of production and social life in harmony with the core principles of Marxist political economy. Decisions about the organization of data flows, what counts as data, and who should decide what data is used to optimize labor performance were all part of the concrete parameters of the political discussions about the shape of this experiment in scientific communism, as were the questions of how to incorporate the collection of environmental data and practices of ecological protection into the vision for technoscientific progress.
My project explores what the theories and practices of data reveal about the political, economic and material aspects of these processes of transformation and what they tell us about the promises and contradictions of a historical alternative to the current conditions of datafication and platformization.
Publications (selection)
Hristova, T., Magee, L. and Soldatic, K. (2025). The Problem of Alignment. AI & Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-02039-2.
Hristova, T. (2024). The Abstraction of Labour from the Factory to the Platform: Charting the Visual Language of Automation. Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation. 18/2.
Hristova, T. (2023). The politics of mediation: power, value and subjectivity in the digital grid of Aadhaar. Journal of Cultural Economy. 17/2: 1-15.
Hristova, T., Magee, L. (2022). Dining out on data: ethics, value and the calculation of risk appetites. In: Phan, T., Goldenfein, J., Mann, M., Kuch, D. (eds.) Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of ‘Ethics’ in AI and Digital Culture. Institute for Network Culture. Theory on Demand series. Available at: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/economies-of-virtue-the-circulation-of-ethics-in-ai/
Hristova, T., Neilson, B., Rossiter, N. (2021). Digital Infrastructure, Liminality, and World-Making Via Asia| On the Block Train: Rethinking Block Technologies on the YuXinOu Express. International Journal of Communication. Vol. 15, 2613-2630.
