ITeG-Ringvorlesung: "If You Could Read My Mind: Neurotechnology and Post-Digital Labor Subjectivities"

Beschreibung

In der ITeG-Ringvorlesung "Digitale Gesellschaft - eine Gestaltungsaufgabe" wird am 16. Dezember 2026 Prof. Dr. Peter Mantello Einblicke geben zum Thema "If You Could Read My Mind: Neurotechnology and Post-Digital Labor Subjectivities".

Zoom-Link für die Online-Zuschaltung: www.uni-kassel.de/go/iteg-lectures-zoom

Peter Mantello is an artist, filmmaker and Professor of Media Studies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. His area of specialization focuses on the intersection between technology, conflict, Artificial Intelligence and surveillance. Combining media studies, International Relations theories, film studies, data studies, and technologies studies, he is interested in the various feedback loops between media, technology, conflict, and popular culture.

Website at APU: Peter Mantello

Zusammenfassung seines Vortrags:

My talk examines how workplace neurotechnology reshapes labor subjectivity under AI-mediated governance. By neurotechnology, I mean cognitive and sensory interfaces that access, monitor, interpret, and modify neural and sensory processes, thereby translating aspects of mental activity into observable data. Proponents claim these systems optimize performance, track attentiveness, and warn of fatigue; critics warn they render workers legible and thus governable within algorithmically driven management systems. I argue that neurotechnology is not simply a more invasive form of biometric surveillance but a broader shift in how cognition is understood, measured, and governed, one that turns attention, focus, and affect into a new form of human capital. Once neural states become quantifiable and comparable, they function as credentials, metrics through which workers are ranked, valued, and rendered employable. A growing literature on neuroethics tends to specify how these systems should operate (ethics) rather than interrogate the political conditions that make their authority possible, illuminating consequences while leaving unexamined the transformations in agency, cognition, and governance that accompany deployment.

The question is therefore not simply whether neurotechnologies are ethical, but how they reshape the conditions under which labor subjectivities are constituted, valued, and governed. Through the marketing discourse and technical architecture of leading providers, the article shows how the promise of objective neural measurement operationalizes this governance while displacing responsibility onto the worker and argues that the datafication of cognition reconfigures the criteria of employability itself. In this way, it contributes not only to the biopolitics of neurotechnology but also to debates on AI in the workplace.