Chat with Roberto Marin

Sociologist and Critical Thinker

About Roberto Marin

In 2017, Roberto Marin published 'Algorithmic Habitus', a field-shifting essay that reframed Bourdieu’s concept through the lens of platform governance, showing how TikTok’s recommendation logic reproduces classed dispositions not via ideology alone, but through micro-temporal feedback loops in attention allocation. He doesn’t treat digital culture as a new domain to be critiqued; he treats it as the primary site where domination now metabolizes itself, silent, scalable, and sedimented in UX design. His fieldwork includes ethnographic observation inside municipal AI ethics review boards in Lisbon and São Paulo, where he documented how ‘transparency’ requirements are routinely translated into performative documentation rituals that obscure rather than reveal power. Marin insists critique must be materially situated: he co-developed the 'infrastructural reading' method, training students to reverse-engineer policy documents by tracing whose labor maintains the servers, whose data trains the models, and whose silence structures the consent forms.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Roberto Marin:

  • “How does Uber's surge pricing reproduce what you call 'temporal dispossession'?”
  • “Can critical theory analyze facial recognition without falling into technological determinism?”
  • “What did your fieldwork in Lisbon's AI ethics board reveal about 'ethics-washing'?”
  • “You reject 'digital dualism'—so where exactly do you locate the materiality of algorithmic bias?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Roberto Marin's 'infrastructural reading' method?
It’s a pedagogical and analytical framework that treats policy documents, terms of service, and technical white papers as layered infrastructure—not just texts to interpret, but sites where labor, energy, jurisdiction, and maintenance are silently encoded. Students learn to annotate not only rhetorical claims but also footnotes referencing outsourced data-labeling firms, server locations subject to specific sovereignty regimes, and the physical cooling systems required for model training.
Has Marin written about social media beyond Facebook and Twitter?
Yes—he focuses on under-analyzed platforms like Mercado Libre’s chat-based seller-buyer interface in Latin America, arguing its 'trust scoring' system functions as a privatized credit rating apparatus embedded in everyday commerce, bypassing formal financial institutions while reproducing colonial debt logics.
Does Marin engage with postcolonial theory?
He critiques the Frankfurt School’s Eurocentrism directly, collaborating with scholars from Dakar and Quito to rework Adorno’s concept of 'non-identity' around Indigenous land epistemologies—arguing that algorithmic land-use planning tools erase relational ontologies by rendering territory as discrete, governable parcels.
What distinguishes Marin's approach to 'platform capitalism' from Shoshana Zuboff's?
While Zuboff centers surveillance as extraction, Marin locates exploitation in infrastructural dependency—e.g., how small farmers in Oaxaca must use proprietary agri-platforms not to be surveilled, but simply to access irrigation schedules, seed subsidies, and market prices, making resistance materially impossible without collective withdrawal from essential services.

Topics

Contemporary Critical TheorySocietyPower

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