Vita
Max Grünberg is a Scientific Associate at the documenta Institut and in the Department of Art and Economies. His academic background is in cultural anthropology, sociology and computer science. His research is particularly concerned with questions of algorithmic sovereignty and is located at the intersection of political economy, science and technology studies and media theory. In his doctoral thesis, he is investigating the role of algorithms in the realization of a post-capitalist economic system. In addition to his research activities, he is co-founder of the Berlin collective Diffrakt, a space dedicated to theory, where he curates the event series Machine Dreams.
Research project
Algorithmic Realism: Communal Production in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing
Even after two hundred years of systemic speculation, no convincing alternative to the market order has emerged. The dissertation project problematizes the idea of a conscious control of economic activity and questions the cipher of the plan from an epistemic and political perspective. Since prediction and optimization algorithms today promise to master the complexity of the task, the focus is on the social role of scientific knowledge gained in the orchestration of social material flows.
Main research areas
Critical AI studies
Political Economy
Platform Capitalism
Digital Socialism
Infrastructure and logistics
Lectures (Selection)
11 I 2022 The Planning Daemon im Rahmen der Historical Materialism Konferenz London
05 I 2022 Marx and Labour Money: An Attempt of Reconstructing an Inconclusive Thought Project im Rahmen des Workshops “Socialism: Rationality and Distribution” an der Freien Universität Berlin
05 I 2022 Future Desire and Communal Production im Rahmen des Workshops “The Algorithmic Road to Socialism” an der Universtität Kiel
06 I 2022 Understanding Needs Registration as a Forecasting Problem im Rahmen des Symposiums Socialist Futures am European University Institute Florence
12 I 2021 Does the Economy Fit into a Matrix? im Rahmen der Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy 2020 “Technologies of Bureaucracy”
09 I 2021 The Administration of Things: Automating Business Forecasts in the Case of Amazon Web Services im Rahmen des workshops “Breaking Models” am Max-Planck Institute für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin
Publications (selection)
Grünberg, Max (2024): Der zählende Papagei. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Grünberg, Max (2023): The Planning Daemon: Future Desire and Communal Production. In: Historical Materialism 31 (4), S. 115–159.
Grünberg, Max (2023): Get Rich or Die Trying: Betting on the Future. In: Umbau Journal.
Grünberg, Max (2023): Automating away the centre? Optimal planning and the menace of bureaucratisation. In: Competition & Change 29 (1), S. 38–63.
Grünberg, Max (2021): Among Cultists: The State of Bitcoin. In: Forschungsgruppe Künstliche Intelligenz und Medientheorie der HfG Karlsruhe.