I am the Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) as well as Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
I am also in China Studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Art and Design, Digital Studies, and Social Computing.
In the fall 2024, I am a visiting scholar at the Paul Tsai China Center at the Yale Law School.
I have spent almost 20 years conducting ethnographic research, predominantly in China but also in the United States, Africa, and Southeast Asia. My research program, broadly construed, advances the social and cultural study of technology. For instance, I have written about China's shifting position in the global political economy of computing, about how data-driven systems are changing industrial and agricultural production, and about the affective labor necessary to sustain innovation economies.
I hold a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Sciences and have worked in the technology industry. My primary research methods are drawn from the humanities and social sciences. I often describe myself as a feminist ethnographer of computing. These thoroughly interdisciplinary commitments allow me to pair critical sensibilities with deep experience of the inner workings of the technology production sites I study.
Before it was known as artificial intelligence (AI), I was following hackers, makers, and startups that worked with Chinese factories to build products that model user behavior as data. I examined how smart devices like the early smart watch, drones, as well as sensor-embedded industrial machines had already been deployed by corporations and governments for population management and industrial upgrading. My publications were among the first to examine how AI began as entrepreneurial experiments that transformed into instruments of political and economic value. This research led to an award-winning book: Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020).
I am currently working on a second monograph based on 16 months of fieldwork in China, undertaken during the pandemic. From September 2021 to December 2022, I was one of a small number of scholars who were able to enter the country. This book draws from fieldwork I conducted in rural parts of the country from industrial agriculture to citizen-led environmental justice initiatives in remote villages to experiments with the spiritual. The book, tentatively titled “Feeling like a State: Control in the Age of AI” challenges the pervasive view of China as the ultimate surveillance state and offers a theory of control amidst a global turn towards AI that takes us beyond vision as its only and primary force by exploring the central role affect has come to play in Chinese and American governance processes.
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BIO
Silvia Margot Lindtner (she/her) is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). She has conducted almost two decades of fieldwork in China, advancing the social and cultural study of technology. In the fall 2024, Lindtner is a Visiting Scholar at the Paul Tsai China Center at the Yale Law School. She is the author of the award-winning book Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020), and co-author of the multigraph Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2020). Lindtner has a courtesy appointment in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design and is affiliated with several interdisciplinary centers and initiatives on campus including the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, the Science, Technology and Society Program, the Digital Studies Institute, the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing Research Group, and directs the Tech.Culture.Matters. research group.
Lindtner has been a Visiting Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai (2021-2024), a CUSP (China-US Scholars Program) Fellow (2021-22), and a fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program (2021-23). Lindtner’s research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), IIE (the Institute of International Education), IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services), Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation. Her work has appeared at ST&HV (Science, Technology, and Human Values), ESTS (Engaging Science, Technology and Society), SocialText, Women’s Studies Quarterly, China Information, ToCHI, ACM SIGCHI (Human-Computer Interaction), ACM CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing), among other venues.
RECENT & Upcoming talks & PODCASTS:
“Residual Data Prototypes,” New School, PERN (Platform Economies Research Network) Conference, April 25-26, 2024.
“Data Engines: Automating China’s Soil and Soul,” UC Irvine, Feb 23, 2024.
Documentary, PBS, Nova, “Inside China’s Tech Boom,” Nov 8, 2023.
Podcast, New Technoviews, with Joseph Bosco, Oct 26, 2022.
Podcast, Sinica, with Kaiser Kuo, July 22, 2022.
Interview, Association for Asian Studies, with Maura Cunningham, July 1, 2022.
Conversation with Melinda Liu: “China’s Zero Covid Policies: Impact and Implications,” hosted by the National Committee on US-China Relations, May 23, 2022.
RESIDUES OR WHAT REMAINS?
Our Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) is running a series of programmatic activities under an exciting theme this academic year 2023-24:
NO_ESC: RESIDUES OR WHAT REMAINS.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to leave nothing behind. It is the sharpening of computational vision, the reach of quantification into the most inner corners of our lives. It is the mass accumulation of pristine data. Life is data, we are told, and AI represents the seamless divination of insight from our traces. Nothing, no-one! escapes. Yet, despite this seemingly inevitable machinery, there are residues - things that stick and smear, pasts that linger, lands wasted, bodies rendered disposable, labor discarded. What if we stick with what remains, with these residues - data not used, life that isn’t attractive to computation, tricky histories of other technological and political moments? What if we attend to residual labor, the work of cleaning up, of redirecting vision, of what is soon to be replaced by machines? What lifeforms with technology might become possible then?
We invite people to think with us on theory, geopolitics, governance, violence, ecologies, and claims to sovereignty in relation to the residues of contemporary data regimes. What new theoretical toolkits might we need in the age of NO_ESC? What does activism look like amidst the global quest to reach, enroll, and govern the left-overs, wasted, discarded, useless?
NO_ESC includes the launch of the NO_ESC art+research zine, a series of panel discussions, a collaboration and A partnership with the AI Center at NYU Shanghai, and an AI ETHICS fellows program.
News:
three Papers with topics ranging from China’s Data-driven governance to Affective Labor in the tech industry in India and the U.S.:
Anubha Singh, Patricia Garcia, Silvia Lindtner. 2023. Old Logics, New Technologies: Producing a Managed Workforce on On-Demand Service Platforms.
Yuchen Chen, Yuling Sun, Silvia Lindtner. 2023. Maintainers of Stability: The Labor of China’s Data-Driven Governance and Dynamic Zero-COVID.
Huber, L., Pierce, C., and Lindtner, S. 2022. An Approximation of Freedom: On-deman Therapy and the Feminization of Labor.
TWO PAPER AWARDS BY ACM:
Sun, Y., Ma, X., Lindtner, S., and He, L. 2023. Data Work of Frontline Care Workers:
Practices, Problems, and Opportunities in the Context of Data-Driven Long-term Care. Impact Recognition.
Sun, Y., Ma, X., Lindtner, S., and He, L. 2023. Care Workers’ Wellbeing in Data-driven Healthcare Workplace: Identity, Agency, and Social Justice. Recognition for Contribution to Diversity and Inclusion.
Prototype Nation (princeton University Press) won the 2022 Joseph levenson Prize for china scholarship post 1900 by the association for Asian studies.
excerpt from the award text: “Theoretically engaging and clearly written, Prototype Nation provides thick ethnographies of individuals and groups committed to alternative ways of producing technologies, while at the same time uncovering the colonial tropes and exploitative labor practices that undergird their work and that sustain the ongoing expansion of finance capitalism. The book thus puts China at the center of a global story of labor precarization, offering insights and provocations on the future tasks of critical scholarship beyond China.”
SOme recent reviews:
Taylor COplen, EASTS (East Asian Science, Technology and Society) Journal
“Prototype Nation is a valuable contribution to the literature on technology, innovation, and creativity in China. The book’s central arguments speak to fundamental questions of innovation and originality in the Chinese context that have long historical roots. …beyond the geographical focus on China, the central insights of the book are of fundamental importance for STS scholars with an interest in complex sociotechnical systems. Finally, beyond the world of academia, the book offers valuable insight for practitioners who seek to contribute toward more ethical systems of technology production. The book’s central argument shows that what seem like inevitable movements of technological promise actually require constant maintenance through the labor of numerous stakeholders. This demonstration of contingency shows readers that the sociotechnical worlds we inhabit are not inevitable, and more equitable, democratic worlds are possible.”
Jason Li, “Looking at China and Seeing Ourselves: Two Ethnographies of Tech in China”
“Ethnographies of tech in China are a rare beast (and a welcome change from the common framing of either business hype or tech dystopia), so we are extraordinarily lucky to have two such books published over the past year to show us what it's really like on the ground there. … And if you think these are just books about China, actually both books show the very real flow of goods, people and ideas from the US to China *and vice versa.* This explains the title of the review — tech in China might seem far but it's a lot closer and familiar than we think.” (Li, Twitter)
Lena Kaufman, China Quarterly:
“the author’s greatest achievement is—far beyond the Chinese case—to render visible and to powerfully question highly ambivalent narratives of progress and techno-solutionism, and the (often-unfulfilled) promises of intervention and happiness that these entail. Scholars such as Ching Kwan Lee and Pun Ngai have already raised awareness of the delirious conditions in Chinese factories, but Lindtner deepens our understanding by revealing the less obvious inequalities in China’s design, digital and entrepreneurial labor… Lindtner provides an original and fresh look at the understudied industries that have merged in the information age. This makes Prototype Nation highly innovative in itself, and a must-read for students and observers of contemporary China… and all those concerned with processes of innovation and technological modernization – not only academics, but also practitioners in precisely these processes.”