NICHOLAS FIORI is a Ph.D. candidate in Politics at the New School for Social Research whose research explores the politics of technology through critical theories of race and capitalism. In a challenge to technological exceptionalism, his work attempts to re-connect the digital present to American political thought and empire.

As a GIDEST fellow, Nick's will be completing his dissertation—Entropy’s Swerve: Algorithms and Race—which traces the algorithm through genealogies of post-war cybernetics and the nineteenth-century concept of entropy. His project situates the algorithmic sorting machine as an assemblage at which point racializing discourses of empire and usefulness are articulated with human (and other) bodies through digital devices. 

Nick's study shows that the metaphor of entropy transits across religious, scientific, and social contexts, and is picked up to justify the appropriation of tropical resources and to exculpate the decline of empire. He traces how information and, later, data are theorized as anti-entropic forces, laying out the design schema for the algorithm as an automatic (re)ordering machine. Along the way, his research stretches across disciplines and into art and popular culture in its documentation of the drive to master entropy’s disordering tendency. Against the present’s creeping technological closure, Nick’s project introduces a politics of entropy’s incomputable swerve, a (chaotic) newness and (non-linear) possibility in the always present un-incorporable remainders of the world (and ourselves). 

Before moving to New York, Nick lived in Los Angeles, attended the University of Southern California, and taught high school debate for many years.