Katina Michael – Gender, Technology & Power Conference 2025

Who Governs the Machine? Technology, Power, and the Fight for Democratic Control

This presentation explores the intersections of “technology and power” through the philosophical and political writings of Simone Weil (1909-1943), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), and Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), and extends the analysis to contemporary questions of gender, artificial intelligence (AI), and governance through the work of Jeremy Pitt (1963- ).
Simone Weil’s reflections on force, obedience, and the mechanization of the human soul lay a foundational critique of how technological systems transform human agency into passive submission, eroding ethical responsibility (Cain and Kent, 2025). Her concept of “gravity” as a metaphor for the mechanical compulsion of modern life (money, technology, and power as an end goal) reveals particularly how technological regimes often strip individuals of interior freedom and render them subjects of impersonal power (Maden, 2025). The gravity of “gravity” is in its downward pull, in effect, a force of evil to where the human soul might despair and feel like it is perpetually being crushed; like a ‘dead man walking’ (Weil, 1952; Harnack, 2022). This is of course in opposition to the force that allows one to flourish, described by Weil as being in a state of “grace” toward spiritual uplift, freedom, and liberation (Pirruccello, 1997).

Hannah Arendt, while equally concerned with the dehumanizing tendencies of modern systems, distinguishes sharply between labor, work, and action in her analysis of the vita activa (Bankston, 2022; Stanford, 2024). She views technology as both an enabler and destroyer of the human condition. In The Human Condition, Arendt (1958) warns against the rise of automation and instrumental reason, which threaten political action and plurality by replacing judgment with calculability. While Weil emphasizes interior moral collapse, Arendt focuses on the political loss of “natality”—the human capacity to begin anew in speech and action (Vatter, 2006). Arendt argues that the capacity to begin something new is a fundamental aspect of human freedom; that, by being born, individuals are not simply products of their past or predetermined by their circumstances, but rather possess the potential to act, to make choices, and to create something new in the world. In other words, while humans remain human, they will always possess agency (Herzog, 2021).

Elinor Ostrom’s work offers a contrast to the often pessimistic readings of technological power found in Weil and Arendt. In Governing the Commons, Ostrom (1990) empirically demonstrates how communities can construct sustainable, participatory institutions to manage shared technological and ecological resources. Her design principles counteract the top-down imposition of technical control with bottom-up rule-making, accountability, and iterative feedback—embodying a distributed form of power that reconnects technological governance with democratic legitimacy (Ostrom, 1994). Ostrom’s transdisciplinary approach meant that she was able to connect with diverse stakeholders in the ecosystem, observing them at the grassroots, and learning how they cooperated toward positive outcomes (Ostrom, 2009). For Ostrom, the adoption of new technology may not have been the central focus of her research, but like Arendt, she acknowledged the role of technology as part of the broader institutional and governance systems. Ostrom believed that technology could support institutions by (1) monitoring institutions and their practices; (2) openly sharing information to effectively manage resources; (3) allowing local and regional units to better coordinate; (4) enabling participation and transparency through platforms; and (5) infrastructure that would allow for the creation of feedback loops and adaptive learning (Ostrom, 2010).

Bringing this discourse into the digital present, Jeremy Pitt’s work at Imperial College London extends Ostrom’s principles into socio-technical systems, advocating for sustainable self-determination, computational justice and legitimate governance as design mechanisms for fair and inclusive AI. Pitt’s (2023) contributions are particularly salient in the context of gender, where AI systems have consistently encoded and reproduced patriarchal biases—manifest in discriminatory algorithms, data availability, data gaps and quality issues, and exclusionary design norms. Pitt’s recent emphasis on the re-distribution of power and community re-empowerment offers a framework for dismantling technocratic dominance and reintroducing democratic oversight over AI systems (Pitt, 2021a).

Modern AI, shaped by profit motives and opaque design, has too often entrenched historical inequities, particularly against women, and other underrepresented minorities. Whether it has been in AI algorithms dismissing women and others for executive roles in corporations, targeting only older white males (Newstead et al., 2023); or discriminating against women who apply for home loans, assuming they cannot make repayments or offering loans at higher interest rates than men; or in a woman’s right to bear a child with flexible leave options that allow for her to be a carer, and a worker without penalty to superannuation or other schemes like life insurance, the case examples abound (Akter et al., 2021). If we are to consider Weil’s concept of the “force of grace” and Arendt’s “natality” in the context of gender empowerment, we must reframe technology and power.

This presentation concludes by proposing that democratic approaches—grounded in deliberation, pluralism, and institutional reflexivity—are essential to displacing the concentration of technological power and restoring human dignity across gender and other social categories (i.e., intersectionality) (UN Women, 2025; UNESCO, 2024). By tracing a philosophical arc from Weil’s ethics, through Arendt’s politics, to Ostrom’s institutions and Pitt’s (2020) commitment to socio-techno-ecological design, this presentation argues for a new synthesis in which technology serves collective autonomy rather than domination. As Arendt summated in one interview, “Action is a “WE” and not an “I”” (Arendt, 1973; Arendt, 2013), and this entirely relevant today in the context of public interest technology (Pitt et al., 2021b; Abbas et al., 2021a; Abbas et al., 2021b).

References

Abbas, Roba; Hamdoun, Salah; Abu-Ghazaleh, Jumana; Chhetri, Netra; Chhetri, Nalini; Michael, K. (2021a). “Co-Designing the Future With Public Interest Technology,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 10-15, Sept. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1109/MTS.2021.3101825
Abbas, Roba; Pitt, Jeremy; Michael, Katina (2021b). “Socio-Technical Design for Public Interest Technology,” IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 55-61, June, https://doi.org/10.1109/TTS.2021.3086260
Akter, Shahriar; McCarthy, Grace; Sajib, Shahriar; Michael, Katina; Dwivedi, Yogesh K.; D’Ambra, John; Shen, K.N. (2021). “Algorithmic bias in data-driven innovation in the age of AI”, International Journal of Information Management, vol. 60, 2021, 102387, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2021.102387.
Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Arendt, Hannah (1973). The Last Interview with Hannah Arendt (1973 English & French), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FkoMm1hs1g
Arendt, Hannah (2013). Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, Penguin Books, London.
Bankston, Carl L., III (2022). “The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt”, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/human-condition-hannah-arendt
Cain, Alex; Kent, James (2025). “Simone Weil on ‘Force’ and the Possibilities of Human Freedom”. The University of Melbourne. Journal contribution [Figshare], https://doi.org/10.26188/28510133.v1
Harnack, Andrew (2022). “Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil”, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/gravity-and-grace-simone-weil
Herzog, Lisa (2021). “Old Facts, New Beginnings: Thinking with Arendt about Algorithmic Decision-Making”, The Review of Politics, vol. 83, no. 4, pp. 555-577, https://doi:10.1017/S0034670521000474
Maden, Jack (2025). “Simone Weil’s Ethic of Resistance: Resisting Not Just Power, but the Race for Power”, Philosophy Break, https://philosophybreak.com/articles/simone-weil-ethic-of-resistance/
Newstead, Toby; Eager, Bronwyn; Wilson, Suze (2023). “How AI can perpetuate – Or help mitigate – Gender bias in leadership”, Organizational Dynamics, vol. 52, no. 4, 100998, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2023.100998
Ostrom, Elinor (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Ostrom, Elinor (2009). Understanding institutional diversity, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Ostrom, Elinor (2010). “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems”, American Economic Review, vol. 100, June, pp. 641–672, https://doi.10.1257/aer.100.3.641
Ostrom, Elinor; Gardner, Roy; Walker, James (1994). Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources, University of Michigan Press, Michigan.
Ostrom, Elinor (1992). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Natural Resources Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 415- (1992). Available at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol32/iss2/6
Pirruccello, Ann (1997). ““Gravity” in the Thought of Simone Weil”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 73–93. https://doi.org/10.2307/2953778
Pitt, Jeremy; Dryzek, John; Ober, Josh “Algorithmic Reflexive Governance for Socio-Techno-Ecological Systems,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 52-59, June 2020, https://doi.org/10.1109/MTS.2020.2991500.
Pitt, Jeremy (2021a). Self-organising Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Foundations of Cyber-Anarcho-Socialism, World Scientific, London.
Pitt, Jeremy; Michael, K; Abbas, Roba (2021b). “Public Interest Technology, Citizen Assemblies, and Performative Governance,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 6-9, Sept. 2021, http://doi.org.10.1109/MTS.2021.3104402
Pitt, Jeremy (2023). “Toxic Technology,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 6-11, March https://doi.10.1109/MTS.2023.3240207
Stanford (2024). “Hannah Arendt”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/
UN Women (2025). “How AI reinforces gender bias—and what we can do about it: Interview with Zinnya del Villar on AI gender bias and creating inclusive technology”, United Nations Women, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/interview/2025/02/how-ai-reinforces-gender-bias-and-what-we-can-do-about-it
UNESCO, IRCAI (2024). “Challenging systematic prejudices: an Investigation into Gender Bias in Large Language Models”. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/generative-ai-unesco-study-reveals-alarming-evidence-regressive-gender-stereotypes
Vatter, Miguel (2006). “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt”. Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 137-159. https://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-090X2006000200008
Weil, Simone (1947). La Pesanteur et la grâce.
Weil, Simone (1952). trans. Gravity and Grace. Published 2003, Routledge, London.

§ 1 General Information

The Online Store is run by the University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927 Warsaw, having legal personality pursuant to article 12 of the Act of 27 July 2005 Law on Higher Education (Journal of Laws No. 164, item 1365, as amended), NIP 525-001-12-66, REGON 000001258.
Address for correspondence (communication between the Customer and the Seller): University of Warsaw, Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, Stawki 5/7, 00-183 Warsaw, Poland; email: gentechpow25@uw.edu.pl, telephone (+48 22) 831 51 53.

§ 2 Definitions

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Seller – University of Warsaw, located at Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927 Warsaw, having legal personality pursuant to article 12 of the Act of 27 July 2005 – Law on Higher Education (Journal of Laws No. 164, item 1365, as amended), NIP 525-001-12-66, REGON 000001258.
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Shop – Online Store run by the Seller at Service https://gentechpower2025.uw.edu.pl/
Regulations – the present Regulations specifying rules of use of the Online Store, available at https://gentechpower2025.uw.edu.pl/index.php/registration/
Cart – functionality offered to the Customer by the Service, allowing for completion of orders.
Electronic address – active e-mail account used at the time of order completion for permanent contact via email.
Product – item available in the Shop and offered to the Customer to buy.
Business day – day of the week from Monday to Friday excluding public holidays.
Form of payment – method of payment for the purchased Product, consisting in particular of payments in the form of electronic transfers, traditional payments or via other electronic payment systems approved by the Seller.

§ 3 Technical conditions of using the Service

In order to use the Service the following conditions must be met:
a) access to the Internet,
b) use of the web browser Mozilla Firefox or any other available on the market with parameters identical to or consistent with its newer versions.
Use of the Service is subject to acceptance of cookies and the Privacy Policy. Non-acceptance of cookies may cause a malfunction of the Website.

§ 4 Rules of placing orders in the Service

Viewing of Products and their prices, and purchasing them is possible without registration in the Service.
Provision of any content that is unlawful (illegal content) to the Seller or the Service is prohibited.
Any interference in the Service and in particular in its functionality or structure is prohibited. The Seller reserves the right to claim damages resulting from the Customer’s actions.
The Seller is entitled to block the Customer Account if the Customer’s actions in the Store or Service may violate applicable law, rights of third parties, rules of social conduct or provisions of the present Regulations. The Customer will be notified about the intention to block the Account via electronic mail. If, despite the notification, the Seller finds that there has been an infringement referred to above, he is entitled to immediately block the Customer Account. Account lock means immediate dissolution of the contract with the Customer referred to in § 5 section 4 by the fault of the Customer.

§ 5 Orders

Order without registration
1. To place an order in the Shop without registering it is necessary to:
  a) select Products by adding them to the Cart;
  b) accept the present Regulations;
  c) indicate the electronic address;
  d) select one of the delivery options offered by the Seller;
  e) indicate the delivery address (if applicable);
  f) select one of the methods of payment offered by the Seller.
2. In order to place the order the Customer should accept the contents of the Cart, and then provide the data referred to in section 1.
3. The provisions of section 1 items 2) – 8) apply accordingly.
The Customer may cancel the order until September 1, 2025. Cancellations can be processed for a full refund (minus administrative fee of 1.5%) if requested before August 1, 2025. After that date, no refunds will be issued upon cancellation. Cancellation may be requested by e-mail to: gentechpow25@uw.edu.pl.
Orders for virtual goods are delivered immediately upon payment clearance with a confirmation e-mail send to the contact address provided by the Customer at the time of purchase.

§ 6 Payment Policy

The Customer makes a payment immediately upon ordering.
Payments can be made at the discretion of the Customer in the following forms:
a) transfer from the Customer’s bank account to the bank account of the Seller, (If the Customer makes a transfer from a foreign account the full IBAN of the Store's account "PL87 1160 2202 0000 0000 6084 9666" must be used and appropriate BIC/S.W.I.F.T. code provided (BIGBPLPWXXX).
b) payment through electronic payment systems,
The Seller excludes the possibility of making a cash payment.
Potential transaction costs do not constitute income of the Seller and depend on the prices indicated by providers of the service, and represent their revenue. These costs are borne by the Customer.
The transaction is considered completed upon settlement.
The Seller or operator of the electronic payment system shall inform the Customer about the payment being cleared.
The Seller or courier service shall inform the Customer of the preparation of the shipment, and then about its dispatch to the address specified by the Customer (if applicable).

§ 7 Complaints

The Customer can report any complaints by e-mail to: gentechpow25@uw.edu.pl.
The Seller shall consider the complaint referred to above within 10 working days from the date of reception of the complaint by e-mail, or in the form of a scan via e-mail or fax in accordance with § 1 section 2. The Customer will provide the goods to the Seller together with the original proof of purchase (receipt or invoice) as agreed with the Seller. If applicable, shipping costs are borne by the Seller. Consideration of the complaint shall be in the form of an electronic message sent to the electronic address of the Customer.
The message referred to in section 2, includes information on how to settle the matter.

§ 8 Protection of personal data and cookies

Personal data given by the Customer in the Shop (gathered during registration or shopping without registration) are processed by the Seller. The Seller is a data administrator in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation), henceforth called GDPR.
Personal data, especially name, surname, address, phone number and e-mail address are processed for the realization of orders and investigation of complaints.
The Customer’s personal data will be stored for 6 years.
Providing one’s personal data is voluntary but not providing them may make it impossible to continue shopping.
The Customer has the right to access data, correct data, delete data or limit data processing possibilities.
The receivers of Customer’s personal data are subjects participating in the realization of the order.
The Customer has the right to file a complaint to Prezes Urzędu Danych Osobowych (President for the Protection of Personal Data) if the Customer finds that his/her personal data processing contravenes the general directive.
The Seller uses cookies. The information gathered thanks to them is aimed to continuously adapt the Service to the Customer’s requirements, preferences or needs, in particular through appropriate customization of features, content and services available in the Service. Details of the cookies policy are available at http://www.uw.edu.pl/polityka-obslugi-cookies-ciasteczek-w-serwisach-uw/.

§ 9 Final Provisions

The present Regulations enter into force on 21 May 2025.
Matters not regulated herein are governed by the relevant provisions of commonly binding law, and in particular:
a) the Act of 23 April 1964 – Civil Code, as amended,
b) the Act of 30 May 2014 on consumer rights, as amended,
c) the Act of 18 July 2002 on electronic services,
d) Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation).
In the case of doubts, the present Regulations are used in accordance with the above regulations and the Customer shall enjoy rights at least equal to the ones indicated therein.
The Seller and the Customer shall settle any disputes that may arise from the application of the present Regulations in the first place amicably and then before the court in accordance with applicable provisions of the commonly binding law.
Any changes to the present Regulations require to be published on the Website. The Seller will keep archives of the present Regulations along with the dates of their validity. Applicability of Regulations in the event of their change is determined based on the time of concluding the contract of sale of the Product.