Qiaoyu Cai is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He works at the intersection of media theory, science and technology studies, literary criticism, and digital humanities, with a focus on the interconnected themes of modernity, sovereignty, and technology in the era of planetary-scale computation. His current work develops a cultural-political framework to analyze the US-China high-tech race as a contest between two distinct paradigms of cloud sovereignty, shaped by each nation’s own historical trajectories of modernization and collective experiences of modernity. It examines the politico-economic and sociocultural dimensions of the two cloud polis and proposes a future-oriented political thinking that responds to the rise of automation technologies and the intensifying geopolitical conflicts.

Another focus of his research explores critical machine learning studies along two directions: first, how the architectural design of machine learning techniques/systems is intertwined with the influence of ideological narratives driven by geopolitical motivations; second, how to design a new sociotechnical and political framework, including the design and development of new tools, methods, and metaphors, for the analysis and critique of deep learning-based artificial intelligence systems. His work is forthcoming in venues such as Theory, Culture & Society, Cultural Critique, and AI & Society. For more information, see his Knowledge Commonspage.

Research Areas: critical media studies, critical infrastructure studies, philosophy of computation, global science fiction, comparative politics, Digital Humanities.

Research Center Affiliations: Transcriptions Center, Literature and the Environment