I am a scholar of technology, media, and aesthetics trained in continental philosophy and critical theory in Europe and the United States. My research examines the history and politics of technological modernity – particularly how the material infrastructures of the modern world embody and uphold relations of power and domination, despite promising to liberate humanity from scarcity and toil.

My doctoral research centered on the longue durée of industrial modernity and what the early Frankfurt School theorists called “instrumental reason,” tracing its roots to the nineteenth century. My dissertation, Karl Marx, Philosopher of Technics: Critique, Alienation, and the Materiality of Social Power, grounded this inquiry in mid-19th-century debates on technology and political economy that decisively shaped the first appraisals of industrialization, including Marx’s key intervention. Drawing on understudied materials from the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²), I reconstructed how Marx came to understand the relationship between capitalism and the modern technical system, against the backdrop of a techno-determinist common sense emerging from the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to prevailing economicist and productivist readings, I argued that Marx theorized industrial development and its constitutive mechanism – the “subsumption” of the labor process by capital – as an alienated organization of human-technical relations, whereby capitalist power becomes embedded in the very conditions of human life.

As I revise this work into a monograph, my ongoing research traces how the core dynamic of subsumption has steered the course of the information age and is reasserting itself in the contemporary AI project – especially in its claim to expand human autonomy through the automation of judgment and reason. Since the postwar period, the digital computer has been heralded as a means of reintroducing human feedback into the impersonal technical apparatuses that 20th-century critics denounced as oppressive, ostensibly redressing the lack of reflexivity associated with mechanization and the hegemony of instrumental reason. Yet this optimistic self-image of the digital age has consistently faced scrutiny within media and technology studies – most pointedly in light of the late Gilles Deleuze’s periodizing concept of “control societies,” which directly linked the rise of the computer to a new diagram of power. Building on my previous inquiry into the relationship between social and technical forms, my current project takes up more explicitly the relationship between the industrial form of the labor process and computation, turning to the 20th-century history of computing, postwar philosophical appraisals of machine intelligence, and the ideological afterlives of the cybernetic movement. Through this constellation, I aim to interrogate the ways in which the ontology of computing machines is bound up with the sociality of capitalist life – and whether the socialized intelligence they harness truly foretells its overcoming.

I hold a Ph.D. from Duke University’s Graduate Program in Literature, where I specialized in critical theory and media philosophy, as well as a Fulbright-funded master’s degree in media studies from New York University. I received my undergraduate training in Spain, where I completed two degrees in philosophy (UNED) and fine art (University of Barcelona). I am currently an affiliated researcher with the Historical Materialism Studies Group of the Societat Catalana de Filosofia – the philosophy section of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, the highest academic body for the Catalan language and culture. My work has appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly and the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, with further articles under review or in preparation for Historical Materialism, Theory, Culture & Society, and Qui Parle. Alongside my research, I have developed substantive experience in writing pedagogy, including two years of writing center practice at Duke’s Thompson Writing Studio and teaching writing-intensive courses on media theory, philosophy of technology, and the history and politics of AI.