I am the Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) as well as Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.

I am also in China Studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP), Art and Design, Digital Studies, and Social Computing.

I have spent almost 20 years conducting ethnographic research, predominantly in China but also in the United States, Africa, and Southeast Asia. My research program, broadly construed, advances the social and cultural study of technology. For instance, I have written about China's shifting position in the global political economy of computing, about how data-driven systems are changing industrial and agricultural production, and about the affective labor necessary to sustain innovation economies.

I hold a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Sciences and have worked in the technology industry. My primary research methods are drawn from the humanities and social sciences. I often describe myself as a feminist ethnographer of computing. These thoroughly interdisciplinary commitments allow me to pair critical sensibilities with deep experience of the inner workings of the technology production sites I study.

Before it was known as artificial intelligence (AI), I was following hackers, makers, and startups that worked with Chinese factories to build products that model user behavior as data. I examined how smart devices like the early smart watch, drones, as well as sensor-embedded industrial machines had already been deployed by corporations and governments for population management and industrial upgrading. My publications were among the first to examine how AI began as entrepreneurial experiments that transformed into instruments of political and economic value. This research led to an award-winning book: Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020).

I am currently working on another monograph tentatively titled “Feeling like a State: Control in the Age of AI” offering a theory of control amidst a global turn towards AI. This book takes us beyond vision as its only and primary force by exploring the central role affect has come to play in Chinese and American governance processes. Both the Chinese and American state position AI as a “return” to a past of national strength. While the detailed articulations vary, each frames the other country’s approach to AI as a threat to its national rebuilding. Their political leaders rely on the production and circulation of feelings from fear of a threatening enemy to happiness attached to a strong nation, wholesome family values, and a “simpler” past. The book draws from in-depth ethnographic research on the uptake of AI to transform the countryside, agricultural industries, and various bureaucratic organizations in both China and America. I show that America’s and China’s approaches to AI have much in common, with AI functioning as a useful "emotional technology" for political regime formation. 

BIO

Silvia Margot Lindtner is Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). She is the author of the award-winning book Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020), and co-author of the multigraph Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2020). She has spent two decades conducting ethnographic research, advancing the social and cultural study of technology. Lindtner has been a Visiting Professor at the Yale Law School and at New York University (NYU) Shanghai. She is a recipient of the 2021-22 CUSP (China-US Scholars Program) Fellowship, which replaced the China Fulbright that year, and she is a fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program. She regularly comments on China and technology in media around the world, including The Economist, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and PBS.

Lindtner’s research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), IIE (the Institute of International Education), IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services), and Intel Labs, among others. In 2020, she was named a Distinguished Member by the ACM, a recognition of “outstanding contributions to the field of computing.” Her book Prototype Nation was awarded the Levenson Prize for China Scholarship post-1900 by the Association for Asian Studies and the Francis L.K. Hsu Prize by the Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA). Her work has appeared at ST&HV (Science, Technology, and Human Values), ESTS (Engaging Science, Technology and Society), SocialText, Women’s Studies Quarterly, China Information, and ACM SIGCHI (Human-Computer Interaction), among other venues.

Lindtner has a courtesy appointment in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design and is affiliated with several interdisciplinary centers and initiatives on campus including the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Program, the Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) Program, the Digital Studies Institute, and directs the Tech.Culture.Matters. research group.

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News & highlights:

Two new papers on affect, control, and the moral economy of AI:

Silvia M. Lindtner. 2025. Feeling like a State: Affect & Control in the Age of AI. [free pdf]

Abstract: Many commentators fear that AI enables new levels of surveillance and thus a crisis for liberal democracy. I argue that an obsession with surveillance has clouded other forms of control that are more difficult to notice, operating through the production and circulation of affect. Twenty years ago, the Aarhus Conference published some of the first critical writing on the themes of affect, AI, and control. I return to this groundbreaking work that offers fresh insights for how we understand contemporary governance of people, nature, and regions. This article offers a feminist ethnography to rethink control and pursue avenues for resistance and alternatives, bringing into conversation my observations from research in rural China and the use of AI in population management.

Yuchen Chen, Silvia M. Lindtner, and Yuling Sun. The Moral Economy of AI.

Abstract: The Chinese party state frames AI as an ideal instrument to transform its rising elderly population from a national crisis into an opportunity. This must be done, its leaders argue, by integrating AI into society in ways that cultivate moral values of a harmonious society and traditional family structures. Drawing on ethnographic research on the implementation of three elderly care programs in Shanghai, we examine how the moral economy of AI comes into being, with a specific focus on the affective labor it necessitates from citizens. The lens of moral economy contributes to prior research on the political economy of technology and labor, as well as to discussions of AI and ethics.

RECENT & Upcoming talks & PODCASTS:

“Feeling like a State: Affect & Control in the Age of AI”, Invited Talk, Harvard University, Workshop on :AI in Media: Global Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions,” Harvard-Yenching Institute, May 16, 2025.

“Feeling like a State: China, America, and Control in the Age of AI,” Invited Talk, Yale Law School, Information Society Project (ISP), November 12, 2024.

“Residual Data Prototypes,” New School, PERN (Platform Economies Research Network) Conference, April 25-26, 2024.

“Data Engines: Automating China’s Soil and Soul,” UC Irvine, Feb 23, 2024.

Documentary, PBS, Nova, “Inside China’s Tech Boom,” Nov 8, 2023.