• Since 2020 - PhD, working title: Algorithmic Realism. Communal Production in the Age of Ubiquitous Computation.
  • 2013 - 2017: European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin (M.A. degree).
  • 2009 - 2013: Cultural Anthropology & Sociology, Goethe University Frankfurt (B.A. degree).

Max Grünberg is a research associate in the Department of Arts and Economies. His academic background is in cultural anthropology, sociology and computer science. His research is particularly concerned with questions of algorithmic sovereignty and is located at the intersections of political economy, science and technology studies and media theory. His doctoral research examines the role of algorithms in the realisation of a post-capitalist economic system. In addition to his research, he is co-founder of the Berlin-based collective Diffrakt, a space dedicated to theory, where he curates the Machine Dreams event series. 

  • Critical AI Studies
  • Political Economy
  • Platform Capitalism
  • Digital Socialism
  • Infrastructure and Logistics

Peer-review articles (selection)

(2023) “The Planning Daemon: Future Desire and Communal Production”, Historical Materialism Journal.

(2023) "Automating away the centre? Optimal planning and the menace of bureaucratisation" in the Competition & Change Journal.

 

Essays (selection)

(2024) "Der zählende Papagei" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

(2023) “Get Rich or Die Trying: Betting on the Future”, Umbau Journal.

(2021) “Among Cultists: The State of Bitcoin”, Blog of the research group on Artificial Intelligence and Media Philosophy at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, 2021.

 

Conferences and presentations

“The Planning Daemon“ as part of the Historical Materialism Conference in London (November 2022)

“Marx and Labour Money: An Attempt of Reconstructing an Inconclusive Thought Project” as part of the workshop “Socialism: Rationality and Distribution” at the Freie Universität Berlin (June 2022)

“Future Desire and Communal Production” as part of the workshop “The Algorithmic Road to Socialism” at the University of Kiel (June 2022)

“Understanding Needs Registration as a Forecasting Problem” as part of the symposium "Socialist Futures" at the European University Institute Florence (May 2022)

“Does the Economy Fit into a Matrix?” as part of the Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy 2020 “Technologies of Bureaucracy” (December 2021) 

“The Administration of Things: Automating Business Forecasts in the Case of Amazon Web Services” as part of the workshop “Breaking Models” at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (September 2021)