Inevitable Algorimages : The Necropolitical Infrastructure of YouTube's Digital Dispositif

Abstract: This thesis explores the relation between technology and the social, how they determine and naturalize each other, by examining YouTube's socio-technical infrastructure. YouTube is theorized as a dispositif that produces regimes of knowledge, power and subjectification within "control societies" characterized by an informational mode of production. Utilizing a media archaeological and materialist, critical theoretical approach, I analyze YouTube's database, interface, users, algorithms and protocols alongside economic factors, media, advertising and intellectual property laws, as technical and social forces of production in which power relations arise. I find that YouTube incites users to make themselves visible through information inputs, processed by database algorithms to produce outputs as inevitable representations of user actions. On the interface, this is translated as a sequence of algorimages, defined by what is "up next", in accordance with an information and "attention economy" extracting revenue by capturing and commodifying users' attention into hierarchies of value. I conclude that algorimages, whether of cats or political violence, are made homogeneous by the execution of an algorithmic command of continual update, propagating them through their destruction as necropower in a necropolitical regime of visibility, producing YouTube as an "ecology of finitude" and control societies as an inevitable, "third nature".