Asher Kessler

Asher Kessler joined the CFI to work on the Rethinking AI for Just and Sustainable Futures project. His research is broadly concerned with how the past informs our relationship to, and understanding of, computing and communication.

For his PhD, Asher gained ESRC funding to produce an intellectual history of Facebook/Meta, under the supervision of Professor Emerita Robin Mansell and Professor Nick Couldry. His thesis analysed the discourses of Big Tech, how they emerged and evolved over the first two decades of the 21st century. More than this though, it historicised Facebook’s ‘thinking’ by examining it alongside and within broader and deeper strands of Western intellectual thought, particularly utopianism, scientific imagining, and colonialism. 

Beyond his PhD, Asher is interested in how discourses around AI come to depict time in different ways, and what this does to a shared understanding of human value. Alongside his work at CFI, Asher teaches at the LSE as well as community and adult education in London.