Algorithmic Equipment, Disassembled. Reclaiming Uncertainty, Resisting Capture

This talk interrogates algorithmic governmentality through the lens of uncertainty, reclaiming uncertainty not as a deficit to be managed but as a vital terrain of resistance against computational capture. Drawing on the work of Félix Guattari, alongside Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Brian Massumi and Tiziana Terranova, it examines how planetary computation operationalizes predictive systems designed to extract, model and pre-empt human potential. Contemporary digital infrastructures — what Terranova calls the “Corporate Platform Complex” — function as extractive, predatory and pathogenic assemblages that transform contingency into programmable certainty. The talk argues that algorithmic governmentality constitutes a regime of automated reason in which anticipatory calculation replaces causality and uncertainty is continuously reformatted into measurable risk. What is at stake is not simply the automation of decision-making, but the erosion of ambiguity, hesitation and open-ended becoming. Revisiting Guattari’s concepts of Integrated World Capitalism and General Collective Equipments, I propose the notion of algorithmic equipment to describe the distributed computational architectures that organize perception, affect, desire and social participation under conditions of planetary computation. These equipments do not merely mediate experience; they actively produce modes of existence calibrated for extraction and behavioural modulation. Against this logic of capture, the talk advances uncertainty as an ontological and political resource. Because computational systems must constantly seize and stabilize the indeterminate, the space of ambiguity remains a site where resistance persists. Drawing on Massumi’s account of potentiality and Guattari’s notion of “optional matter,” I argue that uncertainty contains the unrealized excess that continually escapes prediction. Resistance therefore emerges through friction, refusal, hesitation, recalcitrance and deviation: micro-political gestures capable of interrupting the smooth operationality of predictive systems and reopening the possibility of alternative futures. Ultimately, the talk proposes an allyship with uncertainty as both conceptual orientation and political strategy. To defend uncertainty is to defend the capacity to remain more — and more indeterminate — than what computation can ever predict in advance.