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.

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. 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 Visiting Scholar with the Paul Tsai China Center at the Yale Law School (2024-25), 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. 

News & highlights:

Two new papers on affect, control, and the moral economy of AI

They will soon appear in the proceedings of the fabulous, decennial Aarhus Conference on critical computing (Aug 18-22, 2025):

Silvia M. Lindtner. To appear August 2025. Feeling like a State: Affect & Control in the Age of AI.

Abstract: Many commentators fear that AI enables new levels of surveillance and thus a crisis for liberal democracy. I argue that an obsession with surveillance has clouded other forms of control that are more difficult to notice, operating through the production and circulation of affect. Twenty years ago, the Aarhus Conference published some of the first critical writing on the themes of affect, AI, and control. I return to this groundbreaking work that offers fresh insights for how we understand contemporary governance of people, nature, and regions. This article offers a feminist ethnography to rethink control and pursue avenues for resistance and alternatives, bringing into conversation my observations from research in rural China and the use of AI in population management.

Yuchen Chen, Silvia M. Lindtner, and Yuling Sun. The Moral Economy of AI.

Abstract: The Chinese party-state frames AI as an ideal instrument to transform its rising elderly population from a national crisis into an opportunity. This must be done, its leaders argue, by integrating AI into society in ways that cultivate moral values of a harmonious society and traditional family structures. Drawing on ethnographic research on the implementation of three elderly care programs in Shanghai, we examine how the moral economy of AI comes into being, with a specific focus on the affective labor it necessitates from citizens. The lens of moral economy contributes to prior research on the political economy of technology and labor, as well as to discussions of AI and ethics.

I was promoted to the rank of Full Professor, effective sep 1, 2025!

RECENT & Upcoming talks & PODCASTS:

“Feeling like a State: Affect & Control in the Age of AI”, Invited Talk, Harvard University, Workshop on :AI in Media: Global Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions,” Harvard-Yenching Institute, May 16, 2025.

“Feeling like a State: China, America, and Control in the Age of AI,” Invited Talk, Yale Law School, Information Society Project (ISP), November 12, 2024.

“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.