[Commlist] New book: The Inequality Regime of AI

Massimo  Ragnedda and Maria Laura Ruiu are very pleased to share that 
the new book, The Inequality Regime of AI: Power, Allocation, and the 
Struggle for Justice is now out with Routledge.

The book examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping the 
production and reproduction of inequality. The starting point is that AI 
should not be approached only as a technical innovation, a matter of 
bias, or a question of digital access. Rather, the authors argue that AI 
is becoming an inequality regime: a social, political, and 
infrastructural formation through which people are made visible, 
classified, ranked, predicted, governed, and sometimes excluded.

The book moves beyond earlier debates on digital divides by focusing on 
what we call the allocative turn. In the age of AI, inequality is no 
longer only about access to digital technologies or the ability to 
participate online. It is increasingly about prediction and allocation: 
who controls the data, models, infrastructures, and categories that 
shape access to opportunities, resources, rights, recognition, and voice.

The book asks a series of questions that the authors hope will speak to 
scholars of media, communication, power, and inequality. Who has the 
authority to classify? Who becomes legible to AI systems, and on what 
terms? Who is misread, rendered risky, or excluded? Who benefits from 
automation, and who performs its hidden labour? Who bears the 
environmental costs of intelligent systems? And who gets to define what 
intelligence should be for?

Across the chapters, the authors develop concepts such as the AI 
stratification spiral, algorithmic habitus, techno-colonialism, digital 
feudalism, and redistributive infrastructures. These concepts are used 
to examine AI across everyday life, institutions, labour, welfare, 
education, environmental systems, data economies, and global relations 
of power.

The book's aim is to contribute to a critical but non-fatalistic 
discussion of AI. The book argues that questions of AI justice cannot be 
reduced to ethics, efficiency, transparency, or technical correction. 
They must also be addressed through redistribution, recognition, 
representation, and democratic control.

The book details are available on the Routledge website. For colleagues, 
journals, or reviewers interested in reviewing the book, review copies 
can be requested through the Taylor & Francis review copy request form.

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