Book Talk | AI and Assembly: Coming Together Apart in a Datafied World
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge, the AI in Society Working Group, NYU XE, and the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology on Monday, November 17th to learn about the recently released book, AI and Assembly: Coming Together and Apart in a Datafied World (Stanford University Press, 2025). The co-editors of the book, including NYU XE Professor Toussaint Nothias, will be in conversation with contributor Danaé Metaxa and artist and writer Eileen Isagon Skyers.
Artificial intelligence has moved from the lab into everyday life and is now seemingly everywhere. As AI creeps into every aspect of our lives, the data grab required to power AI also expands. People worldwide are tracked, analyzed, and influenced, whether on or off their screens, inside their homes or outside in public, still or in transit, alone or together. What does this mean for our ability to assemble with others for collective action, including protesting, holding community meetings and organizing rallies? In this context, where and how does assembly take place, and who participates by choice and who by coercion? AI and Assembly explores these questions and offers global perspectives on the present and future of assembly in a world taken over by AI.
The contributors analyze how AI threatens free assembly by clustering people without consent, amplifying social biases, and empowering authoritarian surveillance. But they also explore new forms of associational life that emerge in response to these harms, from communities in the US conducting algorithmic audits to human rights activists in East Africa calling for biometric data protection and rideshare drivers in London advocating for fair pay. Ultimately, AI and Assembly is a rallying cry for those committed to a digital future beyond the narrow horizon of corporate extraction and state surveillance.
Lucy Bernholz is a self-described philanthropy wonk who writes extensively about philanthropy, technology, information, and policy. She founded and led for a decade the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University. Her books include How we Give Now (2021, MIT Press), Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (2021, UC Chicago Press), Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values (2016, UC Chicago Press) and AI and Assembly: Coming Together and Apart in a Datafied World (2025, Stanford University Press)
Danaé Metaxa is Raj and Neera Singh Term Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Computer and Information Science department, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. In their research, Dr. Metaxa studies bias and representation in algorithmic systems and content, focusing on high-stakes social settings like politics, employment, and advertising, and on marginalized groups.
Toussaint Nothias is a Clinical Associate Professor in Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement (XE), and affiliate Faculty in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. He studies the ways global inequalities shape—and are shaped by—journalism, civil society, and digital technologies. His work has notably appeared in the Journal of Communication, Boston Review, Public Books, Africa is a Country, and Communication, Culture, Critique.
Eileen Isagon Skyers is an artist, writer, and curator whose work examines the intersections of digital media and cultural memory. Her practice engages questions of representation, networked aesthetics, and the politics of the interface; her writing has appeared in Frieze, Spike, Hyperallergic, and museum publications including the New Museum’s Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology.