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Short abstract:

My proposal for this panel is in the form of a speculative design prototyping session; we will critically examine the historical relation between the detriment of luck experience and its role as part of the expansion of the manyfold forms of cultural neocolonialism.

Long abstract:

This paper engages with the concept of luck and its historical and political role in the expansion of secular thought and secularism as the ideological basis for democratic liberalism. Secularism as a practice opposed to religiosity and mysticism has had implications beyond immediate political battles. For instance, the culture and language of secularism, along with technological transformations, has displaced the experience of “luck” with the determinism of algorithms and statistics. However, algorithms are the opposite of luck. Algorithms are meant to reduce chance in order to provide concise outputs. My proposal for this panel is in the form of a speculative design prototyping session; we will critically examine the historical relation between the detriment of luck experience and its role as part of the expansion of the manyfold forms of cultural neocolonialism. We will discuss luck as a concept that existed before modernity, its many aesthetics, and new semantics. This presentation connects with the conference theme “Transformation” by engaging with the technological developments of the last decades and its cultural dimensions by centering the concept and experience of “luck” vis-a-vis the algorithm. Did the algorithm –and its rational drive– has displaced the mystic experience of luck? What are the cultural and political implications of this transformation? What is the role of the algorithm in the expansion of neocolonial dynamics in the present? How does “luck” as the undetermined present a political possibility to challenge the politics of the algorithm?