Situating and expanding the scope of dispositions towards automation

Abstract

The four generous commentaries to our article, Dispositions towards automation, have truly enriched and extended our thinking on ‘dispositions’ as a way of challenging binary readings of automation (i.e., either towards capitulation or adaptation). Two of our interlocutors have encouraged us to think more situationally about the way dispositions develop through user experience and encounter, while the other two welcome a further expansion of our ideas to include infrastructural and other non-human or environmental agencies. In this response, we clarify our original curiosities about capital's affective projects with respect to automation, as well as its attempts at steering dispositions in order to mitigate, precisely, the indeterminacy of labour and user ‘reactions’. At the same time, we discuss how the four provocations have inspired us to re-assemble these tendencies and sentiments more plurally, to incorporate a series of overlapping affects, capitalist plots, shifting design values, detours, exigencies, digital glitches, and material interjections. We are impressed by the holism of perspectives presented in this dialogue, and how the discussion has only reinforced ideas about the fragility of automation's relations.