Critical Algorithmic Studies

Der hier vorliegende ethnographische Text untersucht negative soziale Dynamiken, die durch die Nutzung sozialer Medien entstehen können. Das empirische Material basiert auf Feldforschungen, die zwischen 2013 und 2015 sowohl online als auch offline durchgeführt wurden. Bei dem Fallbeispiel handelt es sich um einen kommunalpolitischen Wahlkampf in der südostspanischen Stadt Murcia. Im Fokus stehen parteiinterne Diskussionen innerhalb eines linksgerichteten Bündnisses, die zu einem großen Teil in der Quasi-Öffentlichkeit sozialer Medien ausgetragen wurden. Einstiegspunkt in den Text bildet eine spezifische Vorannahme, die von den Aktivisten und Aktivistinnen im Vorfeld der Kommunalwahl geteilt wurde. Die beforschten Akteure gingen davon aus, dass die Art von Öffentlichkeit, die soziale Medien für sie generierten, ihnen dabei helfen würde, einen erfolgreichen populistischen Wahlkampf zu führen. Konträr zu dieser kulturoptimistischen Perspektive auf Technologie arbeitet der Text einen Widerspruch heraus, der den Wahlkämpfer*innen selbst verborgen blieb: Er bestand zwischen dem Ideal der demokratischen Gemeinschaftsform, das sie in ihrem Bündnis umzusetzen suchten, und der kommerziellen Logik jenes digitalen Mediums, dessen sie sich in ihrem aktivistischen Alltag hierfür bevorzugt bedienten: Facebook. Dessen Fragmentierung und Algorithmisierung wirkten in dem hier untersuchten Sample als Amplifikatoren bestehender sozialer Beziehungen. Zwar verstärkte das soziale Medium in einigen Fällen das Gefühl von Zusammengehörigkeit, größtenteils entfaltete es aber destruktive Dynamiken. Als „Egomedium“ war es nicht nur maßgeblich mit dafür verantwortlich, dass die Wahlkampfstrategie ins Stocken geriet, sondern auch dafür, dass das kommunale Wahlbündnis am Ende zerbrach. Aus der hier vorgestellten, kulturanthropologischen Analyse ergibt sich nicht zuletzt ein gleichermaßen demokratietheoretisches wie medienpolitisches Argument. Ein global operierendes Technologieunternehmen wie Facebook trägt auch eine Verantwortung für jene Formen von Mikro-Öffentlichkeiten, die seine Software – quasi als Nebenprodukt – in unzähligen lokalen Kontexten erzeugt.

Two definitions of algorithm, their uses, and their implied models of computing in society, are reviewed. The first, termed the structural programming definition, aligns more with usage in computer science, and as the name suggests, the intellectual project of structured programming. The second, termed the systemic definition, is more informal and emerges from ethnographic observations of discussions of software in both professional and everyday settings. Specific examples of locating algorithms within modern codebases are shared, as well as code directly impacting social and ethical concerns. The structural distinction between algorithms and social concerns is explained as mirroring the engineering construct of algorithms and data structures. It is proposed that, rather than this separation being an attempt to enforce a professional boundary and evade social responsibility, it is a crucial technical distinction within code which makes it clearer and more transparent. The power structures reinforced by the broader, cultural interpretations of algorithm are reconsidered, along with what it would mean for software to have an inclusive design culture.

O artigo descreve e problematiza acerca da agência material dos atores não-humanos que compõem a plataforma de publicação direta da Amazon. Defende-se o argumento de que os algoritmos desempenham um importante papel nessa complexa rede, agindo não apenas como curadores, mas como uma audiência não humana a ser levada em consideração no ato da escrita dos autores. Por fim, o texto sugere que a agência dessa audiência algorítmica figura como uma pista importante para pensar as novas materialidades envolvidas no processo de produção e representação da informação na indústria do livro digital.

Contemporary power manifests in the algorithmic. And yet this power seems incomprehensible: understood as code, it becomes apolitical; understood as a totality, it becomes overwhelming. This book takes an alternate approach, using it to unravel the operations of Uber and Palantir, Airbnb and Amazon Alexa. Moving off the whiteboard and into the world, the algorithmic must negotiate with frictions—the ‘merely’ technical routines of distributing data and running tasks coming together into broader social forces that shape subjectivities, steer bodies, and calibrate relationships. Driven by the imperatives of capital, the algorithmic exhausts subjects and spaces, a double move seeking to both exhaustively apprehend them and exhaust away their productivities. But these on-the-ground encounters also reveal that force is never guaranteed. The irreducibility of the world renders logic inadequate and control gives way to contingency.

In 2016 Instagram integrated personalization algorithms into its system, promising to show the moments they believe we will care about the most. The platform's personalization logic and its commercial nature raise concerns regarding the emergence of filter bubbles and "individual realities", privileging topics that reflect a firm market logic and represent a reality where capitalism dominates. The present study aims to investigate the existence of a filter bubble on Instagram, posing the following questions: Do filter bubbles exist on Instagram? Do Instagram algorithms favor commercial soft topics? The study employs the algorithm auditing method, impersonating a user interested in soft-topics and another one involved in public-oriented topics by creating fake accounts. Both accounts' recommendations were collected and analyzed qualitatively. The analysis shows that Instagram algorithms render certain topics much more salient, generating a filter bubble of soft topics that closely resembles what Debord introduced as the spectacle.

Am Anfang steht der Verdacht. All die polarisierenden Schlagzeilen, all die datengeladenen Infografiken, all die wütenden Ästhetisierungen des Protestes, je mehr wir uns diesem bildgewaltigen Geschrei sozialer Medien zuwenden, es (berechtigter- und sinnvollerweise) analysieren und kritisieren, desto mehr laufen wir Gefahr, den vielleicht wesentlichen Aspekt der Digitalisierung zu übersehen: die stille Logik der Algorithmen, die unsere Bilderwelten auf den Displays zusammenhält oder, präziser gesagt, die diese Welten überhaupt erst zusammenrechnet. Dieser Text analysiert den Zusammenhang von Bildern und Algorithmen aus kulturanthropologischer Perspektive. Dieser Zusammenhang erscheint zentral für das wir wir heute "Öffentlichkeit" nennen. Welche Folgen haben die durch Algorithmen fragmentierten "Timelines", die wir auf unseren Interfaces sehen, auf unsere Demokratie, wenn die geteilten (visuellen) Inhalte auf einer zutiefst emotionalen Ebene wirken? Welche Auswirkungen haben die so entstehenden Mikro-Öffentlichkeiten auf den gesellschaftlichen Pluralismus und populistische Tendenzen?

Although the cultural and social purpose of algorithms is the object of much public debate and contestation, their function is often compared with that of a renowned figure in the intellectual milieu: the curator. In this article I want to look at the relationship between these two agents-why they are compared and how they influence each other-in order to address the following question: is the curator working with or against the algorithm? Through the analysis of three hybrid artistic and curatorial experiments (including my own curatorial work) I want to problematise the false dichotomy of working either with or against the algorithm. I suggest instead that a critically reflexive approach to both the procedures of technology and art curating, to their biases and gatekeeping mechanisms, is necessary to address the crisis of cultural value brought about by the algorithmic world and for forging strategic alliances between humans and machines that can channel new forms of creativity and cooperation.

This study uses various conceptual definitions of control as an analytical lens to explore the Netflix platform. We experiment with various questions of control to examine how control is enacted on Netflix, how it is embedded in different interface elements, and how it influences our experiences with and through the platform. Our analysis highlights how control on Netflix is never situated within a single entity. Instead, it is distributed and continuously reproduced in the process of interaction between different human and nonhuman entities within the sociotechnical Netflix experience. Ultimately, this study champions the idea of control as a sensemaking device, which can be used to analyze complex interaction processes in heavily-mediated environments, allowing us to continue past the now typical stopping point of saying infrastructures are simply entangled. It is a particular thread in the tangle we can pull on, to examine what’s going on, rhetorically or ideologically, within or because of the routines created through our everyday uses of platforms.

official citation (please use :)
Markham, A. N., Stavrova, S., & Schlüter, M. (2020). Netflix, imagined affordances, and the illusion of control. In Plothe, T., & Buck, A. (Eds.). Netflix at the Nexus: Content, Practice, and Production in the Age of Streaming Television (pp. 29-46). London: Peter Lang.

Esta dissertação tem por objetivo tecnografar as agências algorítmicas atreladas ao preço dinâmico da Uber a partir das dimensões retórica/narrativa, material/infraestrutural e afetiva/imaginária que o constituem. Mais especificamente, interessa-nos investigar tais agências a partir dos modos como elas produzem e afetam formas de gerir e experienciar o trabalho. Orientados pela noção foucaultiana de "dispositivo", articulamos um olhar disposicional que considera as agências algorítmicas em sua integração a uma rede heterogênea e dinâmica composta por atores variados. Buscamos compreender as relações de poder e campos de saber que permeiam essas agências, considerando tanto o que a Uber declara sobre os algoritmos, quanto as percepções daqueles que têm suas experiências de trabalho atravessada por eles: os motoristas Uber. Através da tecnografia, operacionalizamos esse olhar disposicional explorando inscrições que materializam o preço dinâmico e as agências algorítmicas, ancorando-os em práticas situadas. Nesse movimento, buscamos compreender quando, e em quais circunstâncias, os algoritmos emergem como uma agência decisiva nas práticas e discursos que organizam o trabalho dos motoristas. Esta pesquisa se baseia prioritariamente em contribuições teóricas e metodológicas vinculadas aos Estudos de Plataforma e aos Estudos Críticos de Algoritmos, em especial àquelas que se aproximam dos estudos de comunicação e mídia. A partir deste referencial, propomos uma conceituação sobre algoritmos e poder algorítmico que informa o restante do trabalho. A análise da  dimensão retórica/narrativa do preço dinâmico revelou a articulação da promessa de objetividade dos algoritmos a um ideal de mercado autorregulado. A exploração da dimensão material/infraestrutural examinou os esforços de desenvolvimento tecnológico da Uber que subsidiam a operacionalização do preço dinâmico por meio da datificação de territórios e da antecipação de dinâmicas futuras. Já a dimensão afetiva/imaginária enfatiza as percepções e experiências dos motoristas em seus encontros cotidianos com o preço dinâmico, bem como os afetos, estratégias e saberes que emergem nestes encontros. Finalmente, nas considerações finais, alinhavamos essas três frentes de análise à luz do olhar disposicional e fornecemos alguns apontamentos sobre as precariedades e incertezas que marcam o trabalho algorítmico.

The paper examines the intersection of technological design of Social Media communication, the notion of post-politics-affective turn in contemporary (Western) societies and the rise of populism as a trend in political communication. Following on conceptualizations for a Social Media approach to a broadly defined critical discourse studies framework (KhosraviNik, in: Kalyango and Kopytowska (eds) Why discourse matters: negotiating identity in the mediatized world, Peter Lang, New York, 2014, in: Flowerdew and Richardson, Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies, Routledge, London, 2017b), the paper attempts to integrate discussions on affective nature of communication in participatory web ecology and consequences of algorithmic regimentation of meaning bearing resources (e.g., news and entertainment) on Social Media. Issues around quality and distribution of digital discursive practices and their relations to traditional perceptions of rational politics, within the internalised ethos of visibility-as-legitimacy, are critically elaborated and examined. While the rise of right wing populism (e.g., Trump presidency, Brexit vote) should primarily be explicated within qualities of the context on the ground, i.e., the deliberate and well-orchestrated misplacement of real grievances in society through discursive operation and manipulation (KhosraviNik in Insight Turk 19(3):53–68, 2017a), it is equally important to critically elaborate the function and consequences of (digital) media practices as a main part of this socialization context. The overall argument here is that the hyper-normalization and triumph of neo-liberal rationality together with new media technological affordances, design and requirements have created a momentum for the growth of haphazard

O objetivo desta tese de doutorado é analisar o processo de "plataformização" do jornalismo pelo Facebook, com foco nas disputas e controvérsias em torno das parcerias comerciais, tecnológicas e editoriais estabelecidas entre a plataforma e instituições jornalísticas. Por plataformização entende-se o processo de imbricamento e mútua moldagem entre a lógica das plataformas online e diferentes setores sociais. No caso do jornalismo, o Facebook se oferece como infraestrutura que promete soluções e demanda ajustes nas práticas e lógicas de funcionamento das instituições. Nosso estudo se concentra entre os meses de janeiro de 2014 e julho de 2019. Neste período, identificamos dois momentos principais deste processo de plataformização: o primeiro está centrado na implementação da ferramenta Instant Articles, através da qual, desde 2015, a plataforma procura se estabelecer como infraestrutura para a produção, circulação e monetização do conteúdo jornalístico; o segundo se organiza em torno do Facebook Journalism Project, iniciativa lançada em 2017 a fim de estreitar os laços e fomentar o setor jornalístico através de iniciativas como financiamento de projetos, treinamentos, e parcerias com agências de fact-checking. A pesquisa também se dedica a analisar dois momentos de crise: a seleção de conteúdo no Trending Topics e a exclusão da fotografia “The Terror of War”. Tomadas como “controvérsias algorítmicas”, estas situações ocorridas em 2016 nos permitem compreender como um crescente questionamento da suposta neutralidade das agências do Facebook foi decisivo nos ajustes propostos para a plataformização do jornalismo. Nosso referencial teórico é composto por conceitos vinculados aos Science and Technology Studies, mais especificamente aos Estudos de Plataforma, aos Estudos Críticos de Algoritmos e à Teoria Ator-Rede. A cartografia de controvérsias e o modelo “the connective approach” (VAN DIJCK, 2013a) são nossas principais inspirações metodológicas. Dentre os autores com os quais dialogamos estão Van Dijck et al. (2018), Helmond (2015), Helmond et al. (2018), Bucher (2012 e 2018), Bucher e Helmond (2017), Plantin et. al (2018), Nieborg e Poell (2018), Gillespie (2010, 2018), Napoli e Caplan (2018).

Discourse analysts have worked on digital data for decades now (see Herring, 1999; Thurlow & Mroczek 2011), initially treating digital data as human texts (Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2018), then increasingly as human, multimodal interaction mediated through digital media (Androutsopoulous, 2015), also attending to digital platforms and their affordances in ethnographically inspired discourse analyses (

This dissertation traces the rise of digitally-driven policing technologies in order to make sense of how prevailing logics of governance are transformed by ubiquitous computing technology. Beginning in the early 1990s, police departments and theorists began to rely on increasingly detailed sets of metrics to evaluate performance. The adoption of digital technology to streamline quantitative evaluation coincided with a steep decline in measured crime that served as a proof-of-concept for the effectivity of digital police surveillance and analytics systems. During the turbulent first two decades of the 21st century, such digital technologies were increasingly associated with reform projects designed to improve the transparency and accountability of police departments. This dissertation challenges that assertion, and argues that digitization functions to make “numerical” and “mathematical” racial and sexual violence that is internal to policing neoliberal political economy. Rather than transparency and accountability, this dissertation posits that the effect of digitally-driven police technology is the accelerative disentangling of the “human” from “life” and “life” from government. The consequence has been the ossification of a racialized carceral under the aegis of putatively anti-racist technocratic governance.

Currently discussed under the term “echo chambers,”
online networks reproduce gender and racial biases,
as well as reinforcing social and economic inequalities
embedded within society. As online communities have
become more homogeneous, they have also shifted from
the nineties cyberutopian vision of fluid, anonymous
online beings to an imperative of an authentic, consistent
social media profile. Social media networks became
a place for real data, real names, real places, and real
neighbors. Neighborhood platforms like Nextdoor or
Amazon’s Neighbors by Ring see the relevance of their
product in focusing on connecting real people living
next to each other rather than people in a global online
network. But what happens when neighborhood districts
and data neighborhoods get linked in a social media neighborhood network? Networks of hybrid offline and online information based on small-scale areas and groups of people connected to machine-readable user profiles owned by private tech companies create various political
and ethical problems, like the potential for surveillance,
privacy and security concerns, and issues of discrimination.
Two important implications of anonymity arise in the
context of network science and the neighborhoods it
produces. One has to do with a representation of identity
based on groups of actors with the same characteristics,
and the other with techniques and regulations of (non)
identification. Both concepts influence and shape each
other; their history and their interdependence with social
and technical conditions have to be understood. By
tracing the history of neighborhood developments like the
neighborhood unit that evolved from the industrial city,
the block regime in Nazi Germany, the countercultural
idea of alternative ways of communal living, the vision
of a virtual global village, and social media neighborhood
networks linked to nearest-neighbor analytics, this paper
traces how historically developed relations of anonymity
and neighborhoods affect subjectivity, fairness, and
relations of equality and difference today.

From the recommendation of cultural content to the identification of potential criminals, a growing number of activities are ordinarily delegated to algorithms and AI systems. These are narrated as neutral technologies which make complex processes more efficient and lead to objective results. However, a wide literature argues that algorithms are social products that reflect the particular interests, cultural assumptions and biases of individuals and organizations. The present contribution aims to deconstruct in a Foucaultian way the algorithmic neutrality myth, illustrating its genesis, discursive facets and weaknesses, also drawing from a series of empirical cases. In the conclusion, we propose a counternarrative of the algorithm focused on explainability and collective sovereignty.

Deleuze erweist sich in dieser Arbeit als einer der systematischsten Denker des Poststrukturalismus. Übernahmen aus der Mathematik durchziehen seine gesamte Philosophie – eine radikal immanent denkende Prozessphilosophie, die durchgehend um das Problem von Differenz und Wiederholung kreist. Deleuze liefert dabei weder eine Philosophie der Mathematik im Sinne einer Grundlegung, noch soll die Mathematik zur Methode der Philosophie werden. Stattdessen ist sie eine Gegenspielerin der Philosophie: Die Philosophie liefert der Mathematik Widerstände und die Mathematik droht Themen der Philosophie ständig zu vereinnahmen.

Für Deleuze ist Mathematik in erster Linie Differentialrechnung. Diese ist nicht von ihren Anwendungen zu trennen: Biologie, Thermodynamik, Informationstheorie, Linguistik, … und dabei reicht die Perspektive auf die Mathematik von Topologie über Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung bis hin zu metamathematischen Problemen. Fluchtpunkt von Deleuzes Untersuchung ist das Problem der Kontrolle. Strukturen, so dynamisch sie auch begonnen haben mögen, altern. Sie verlangsamen sich, werden rigider, steifer, bestimmter und bestimmender. Deleuze sucht in der Philosophie nach Waffen für den politischen Kampf gegen die Kontrolle, deren Griff sich dank Mathematisierbarkeit immer mehr ausweitet. Kurz: Deleuzes radikaler Ansatz lässt sich systematisch bis an die Schwelle dessen entwickeln, was wir heute Algorithmenkritik nennen würden.

Methodisch nimmt die Arbeit dabei eine systematische Rekonstruktion vor, wobei Verbindungslinien zu anderen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen bewusst ernstgenommen werden. Die mit ihnen verbundenen Argumente werden entwickelt und gezielt weitergetrieben, um nachzuweisen, dass sie sich systematisch zusammenfügen lassen. Es zeigt sich schließlich, dass sich auf Überlegungen in Deleuzes Spätwerk und den gemeinsam mit Félix Guattari verfassten Texten aus Deleuze früheren Texten entwickeln und ausdeuten lassen: Deleuzes Philosophie erlaubt eine neue, kritische Perspektive auf algorithmische Kontrollregime.

In this work Deleuze proves to be one of the most systematic thinkers of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Adoptions from mathematics permeate his entire philosophy – a radically immanent approach to process philosophy that revolves around the problem of difference and repetition. Deleuze neither provides a philosophy of mathematics in the sense of a foundation, nor should mathematics become a method of philosophy. Instead, mathematics is an antagonist of philosophy: philosophy provides resistance to mathematics, and mathematics threatens to constantly take over the themes of philosophy. For Deleuze, mathematics is first and foremost differential calculus. It cannot be separated from its applications: Biology, thermodynamics, information theory, linguistics, … and the perspective on mathematics ranges from topology to probability theory to metamathematical problems. Looming point of Deleuze's investigation is the problem of control. Structures, as dynamic as they may have begun, age. They slow down, become stiffer, more rigid, more determined and more determining. In philosophy, Deleuze looks for weapons for the political struggle against control, whose grip is expanding more and more thanks to mathematizability. In short: Deleuze's radical approach can be systematically developed to the brink of what we would call algorithmic criticism today. In methodological terms, the work undertakes a systematic reconstruction in which connecting lines to other scientific disciplines are purposefully taken seriously. The arguments associated with them are continually developed and purposefully advanced in order to prove that they can be systematically put together. Finally, it becomes apparent that reflections in Deleuze's late work and the texts from Deleuze written jointly with Félix Guattari can be used to develop and interpret earlier texts: Deleuze's philosophy allows a new, critical perspective on algorithmic control regimes.

We are all living algorithmic lives. Our lives are not just media rich, they increasingly take place in and throu algorithmically programmed media landscape.[1] Algorithms, as a result of digitalisation and th computerisation of the internet, are ubiquitous today. We use them to navigate, to buy stuff, to work from ho search for information, to read our newspaper and to chat with friends and even people we never met befo live our social lives in post-digital societies: societies in which the digital revolution has been realised. result, algorithms have penetrated and changed almost every domain in those societies. Algorithms have become a normal and to a large extent invisible part of our world. Hence they are questioned. Only when big issues erupt-think about Facebook's role in Trump's election, the role of cons theories in the raid on Capitol, or content moderation failures-do debates on the role of digital platform their algorithms become prominent. Otherwise, they just seem to be "there", just as the old media is part

The alt-right, the different chapters of the pan-European movement Generation Identity and the rise of the so-called radical right populist parties in the West have been responsible for the renewed interest in the metapolitical project of La Nouvelle Droite. In this

Moral critiques of computational algorithms seem divided between two paradigms. One seeks to demonstrate how an opaque and unruly algorithmic power violates moral values and harms users’ autonomy; the other underlines the systematicity of such power, deflating concerns about opacity and unruliness. While the second paradigm makes it possible to think of end users of algorithmic systems as moral agents, the consequences of this possibility remain unexplored. This article proposes one way of tackling this problem. Employing Michel Foucault’s version of virtue ethics, I examine how perceptions of Facebook’s normative regulation of visibility have transformed non-expert end users’ ethical selves (i.e., their character) in the current political crisis in Brazil. The article builds on this analysis to advance algorithmic ethical subjectivation as a concept to make sense of these processes of ethical becoming. I define them as plural (encompassing various types of actions and values, and resulting in no determinate subject), contextual (demanding not only sociomaterial but also epistemological and ethical conditions), and potentially harmful (eventually structuring harms that are not externally inflicted by algorithms, but by users, upon themselves and others, in response to how they perceive the normativity of algorithmic decisions). By researching which model(s) of ethical subjectivation specific algorithmic social platforms instantiate, critical scholars might be able to better understand the normative consequences of these platforms’ power.

Deleuze erweist sich in dieser Arbeit als einer der systematischsten Denker des Poststrukturalismus. Ubernahmen aus der Mathematik durchziehen seine gesamte Philosophie – eine radikal immanent denkende Prozessphilosophie, die durchgehend um das Problem von Differenz und Wiederholung kreist. Deleuze liefert dabei weder eine Philosophie der Mathematik im Sinne einer Grundlegung, noch soll die Mathematik zur Methode der Philosophie werden. Stattdessen ist sie eine Gegenspielerin der Philosophie: Die Philosophie liefert der Mathematik Widerstande und die Mathematik droht Themen der Philosophie standig zu vereinnahmen. Fur Deleuze ist Mathematik in erster Linie Differentialrechnung. Diese ist nicht von ihren Anwendungen zu trennen: Biologie, Thermodynamik, Informationstheorie, Linguistik, … und dabei reicht die Perspektive auf die Mathematik von Topologie uber Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung bis hin zu metamathematischen Problemen. Fluchtpunkt von Deleuzes Untersuchung ist das Problem der Ko...

Syllabus. “Big data” describes everything from weather satellites to Google search histories and Twitter feeds. “Data exhaust” — the “waste” information we leave behind about ourselves whenever we use computers or cellphones — has become a valuable resource for commerce as well as for sociology and political analysis. Algorithms — well-defined procedures for processing information automatically —provide the key to detecting patterns in big data, and turning data exhaust into useful knowledge about people and processes. Taken together, these three phrases capture a major sociotechnical transformation manifested in politically significant phenomena such as “fake news,” Twitter bots, prediction markets, racial profiling, autonomous robotic weapons, Bitcoin, and hacked elections.

These phenomena create unprecedented policy challenges. Effective intervention starts with understanding exactly what these challenges are. The trajectory of this course runs from questions of definition through examples of the often-unexpected, difficult-to-control effects of algorithmic processes and data-centric analysis to the cultural changes associated with algorithmic systems such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Finally, we will explore contrasting approaches to the governance of data and algorithmic systems in the United States, the European Union, and the People’s Republic of China.

Readings are drawn from science & technology studies, information science, anthropology, communication, media studies, legal theory, sociology, and computer science, with additional contributions from psychology and philosophy. No particular technical, humanistic, or social scientific background is required, but some familiarity with basic computer science concepts is assumed.

Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control has been the most common entry point for interrogating the ways in which contemporary digital technologies have altered the social and the subjective from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective. It is, however, in A Thousand Plateaus that we find the most comprehensive set of resources for grappling with the Algocene, the contemporary digitally interconnected world of ubiquitous computing, drones, data mining, smart cities, social media, automated trading and other data-driven technologies that are heavily reliant upon algorithmic processes and deep learning networks. In this broad survey, I argue that in order to grapple with these new technological assemblages and the implications of their deployment across society, we should posit a new major stratum, the algoplastic, and, along with it, new modes of operation of order-words and the regimes of signs they form part of. I conclude by posing some of the new problems that emerge with the Algocene.

This paper proposes situated data analysis as a new method for analysing social media platforms and digital apps. An analysis of the fitness tracking app Strava is used as a case study to develop and illustrate the method. Building upon Haraway's concept of situated knowledge and recent research on algorithmic bias, situated data analysis allows researchers to analyse how data is constructed, framed and processed for different audiences and purposes. Situated data analysis recognises that data is always partial and situated, and it gives scholars tools to analyse how it is situated, and what effects this may have. Situated data analysis examines representations of data, like data visualisations, which are meant for humans, and operations with data, which occur when personal or aggregate data is processed algorithmically by machines, for instance to predict behaviour patterns, adjust services or recommend content. The continuum between representational and operational uses of data is connected to different power relationships between platforms, users and society, ranging from normative disciplinary power and technologies of the self to environmental power, a concept that has begun to be developed in analyses of digital media as a power that is embedded in the environment, making certain actions easier or more difficult, and thus remaining external to the subject, in contrast to disciplinary power which is internalised. Situated data analysis can be applied to the aggregation, representation and oper-ationalization of personal data in social media platforms like Facebook or YouTube, or by companies like Google or Amazon, and gives researchers more nuanced tools for analysing power relationships between companies, platforms and users.

This article addresses the need to find alternative ways to envision, develop and govern public service media's (PSM) online services and data-driven systems. By critically discussing both opportunities and shortcomings of how European PSM organisations developed their online services and personalisation systems, we argue that in their own platformisation processes, PSM have partially lost their distinctiveness and have not been able to provide viable alternatives to the dominant audiovisual media platforms. Thus, building on Mouffe's agonistic theory and Illich's conviviality theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework to radically rethink the guiding principles and rationales driving public service platforms, in order to develop viable alternatives to the currently dominant models. By doing so, we envision the development of such services as convivial tools that are based on three principles, namely, symmetry of power (intended as hackability, openness and algorithmic conviviality), independence and environmental sustainability.

Our objective in this paper is to present and discuss the complexification of the process of platformization of journalism by Facebook, triggered by the implementation of the Facebook Journalism Project (FJP), in January 2017. Since then, the platform has been associating itself with new and varied actors, expanding its fronts and positioning itself as a coordinator of activities related to journalistic institutions. At the same time, it continued to offer itself as an infrastructure for the development of journalistic products and businesses. Based on the Platform Studies and methodologically inspired by the Cartography of Controversies, we present the FJP and public demonstrations by journalists, researchers and other actors involved in its implementation. The diversification of partnerships, the inclusion of pedagogical actions, the renegotiation of prescriptive and normative dimensions that guide journalistic institutions, and the consolidation of the platform as an infrastructure are the main issues discussed at the conclusions.

Over the past decade, commercial social media platforms have scaled up, in terms of the number of users, and scaled out, in terms of integration into public life, taking on infrastructural significance. This paper adapts sociologist Norbert Elias' conceptualization of the civilizing process to examine the role of social media in society, arguing that social media platforms establish socially sanctioned categories of people and modes of conduct. Taking Facebook as an exemplar, the paper analyzes the pedagogical, punitive, and incentivizing practices through which platforms produce social norms and societal ideals. From the company's ambition to become the social infrastructure of the globe and its expansionist history, to policy documents and moderation practices, to formatted interactions and incentive structures, Facebook universalizes appropriate conduct and emotional expression in accordance with the interests of brands and advertisers. With its integration of information technology and automated decision making, Facebook takes over tasks traditionally associated with institutions like the home, the school, and the workplace and acts as a civilizing infrastructure in a double sense: first, infrastructure itself is civilized by the ability to sense and judge people and actions, and second, infrastructure becomes a civilizing force in the world on the basis of these abilities. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the implications of civilizing infrastructure for our understanding of civility, Facebook, and infrastructural politics.

How is life mapped, analyzed, and regulated through the algorithmic? This text investigates a particular algorithmic object—Palantir Gotham, a platform promising to uncover insights from vast amounts of information. Developed initially for intelligence and military organizations, the platform has been rapidly adopted by an array of law enforcement agencies as well as corporations in the financial, health, food, and media sectors, infusing the algorithmic further into the everyday. The highly complex algorithmic ecology of Gotham is unpacked using the notion of the machine—strategic intersections of matter with particular flows and capacities. The first machine is composed of several Gotham tools, the ‘stack’ of hardware which powers those tools, and the analyst which uses them to uncover patterns of life. The second machine zeroes in on a particular instance of Gotham, examining how the analyst and license-plate data used by the LAPD comes together to regulate human life in Los Angeles. This unpacking reveals the logic and performativities specific to the algorithmic, qualities which signal a shift in the modalities of power, from the somatic to the systematic. But power is never totalizing and these machines also reveal the inconsistencies in algorithmic logic, errors which inspire more effective models for response than that of resistance or refusal.

Algorithmic vision, the computational process of making meaning from digital images or visual information, has changed the relationship between the image and the human subject. In this paper, I explicate on the role of algorithmic vision as a technique of algorithmic governance, the organization of a population by algorithmic means. With its roots in the United States post-war cybernetic sciences, the ontological status of the computational image undergoes a shift, giving way to the hegemonic use of automated facial recognition technologies towards predatory policing and profiling practices. By way of example, I argue that algorithmic vision reconfigures the philosophical links between vision, image, and truth, paradigmatically changing the way a human subject is represented through imagistic data. With algorithmic vision, the relationship between subject and representation challenges the humanistic discourse around images, calling for a critical displacement of the human subject from the center of an analysis of how computational images make meaning. I will explore the relationship between the operative image, the image that acts but is not seen by human eyes, and what Louise Amoore calls an “emergent subject,” a subject that is made visible through algorithmic techniques (2013). Algorithmic vision reveals subjects to power in a mode that requires a new approach towards analyzing the entanglement and invisiblization of the human in automated decision-making systems.

This is a statement at the broadest level of abstraction of my basic concerns and research interests. The particular objects and practices I study are not mentioned except in passing. It is a revised version of the conclusion of the thesis I wrote as a student at Dartmouth College in 2020.

Platform companies that intermediate on-demand labour markets, usually described as gig economy platforms, are currently at the forefront of debates about the future of work. It has been widely documented in the literature that major gig economy platforms claim to offer flexibility and independence to workers, while at the same time using algorithmic control techniques to manage them. Through this, companies avoid the responsibilities of formal labour relationships and shift risks to the workers. In order to do so, however, platform companies need to rely on discursive strategies that legitimise their model.
Claims to legitimacy need to appeal to shared conceptions of public value and thus are always contingent on the specific cultural contexts in which they are deployed. However, discursive strategies employed by gig economy companies outside of the USA or Europe have scarcely been explored in the literature. By applying a critical discourse analysis (CDA) to public utterances of the leaders of the Colombian gig economy platform Rappi, this dissertation will look at how platform owners strategically use discourse to justify their accumulation model in the South American context and how in doing so they may create, reproduce or legitimise social hierarchies between different groups in the platform economy.
The research found that, in addition to neoliberal justifications based on the notions of markets as efficient and emancipatory, Rappi's claims for legitimacy draw elements from development discourses. Discourse on development is used to position precarious working conditions as a consequence of the underlying condition of Colombia as a ‘poor’ on ‘underdeveloped’ country. This, in turn, has the effect of depoliticising workers' concerns and sub-ordinating them to the higher goal of achieving ‘development’ for the country. Moreover, this framing constructs ‘underdevelopment’ as a technical problem that calls for technical solutions, placing the platform provider as an actor who can deliver these solutions.
By understanding discourse as existing in a dialectical relationship with non-discursive practices, this work explores how different cultural and material contexts lead to different legitimation strategies. Justifications are relevant not because they may be concealing an ‘actual reality’ but instead because the need for justification shapes the conditions of possibility for how accumulation models are materially implemented. Therefore, by developing a critique to the justificatory logics used by platforms, the final objective is not just to denaturalise or lay bare the discursive constructs underlying them, but rather to do so in a way that can force improvements in terms of justice by requiring new justifications to be formulated in response.

Under conditions of so-called Platform Capitalism, software and algorithms undertake the important task of designing the interaction amongst online users and establishing criteria of relevance for content. As such, they operate as curatorial agents of platforms’ content, establishing what is there to see, know and consume. This state of affairs calls for a revision of the traditional role of the (human) curator who is confronted with an online environment characterised by the unprecedented collision of commercial, aesthetic, cultural and political interests. The question of what kind of relationship the curator shall create with the algorithm then becomes crucial: is this a relationship of antagonism, resistance or alliance? How do these two curatorial agents influence each other? In this article, I analyse a cluster of hybrid artistic and curatorial experiments (including my own curatorial work) that foregrounds online platforms as discrete modes of socio-technical assemblages that...

The Like button is simultaneously a means of social interaction and a tool to evaluate social media content. Likes are built into the infrastructure of platforms, fueling personalized searches, recommendations, and targeted advertisements while contributing to the economic valuation of platforms and users alike. Working at the intersection of infrastructure and practice, we analyze the experience of everyday evaluations on social media to understand how platforms shape what people care about. Based on in-depth interviews with 25 artists who use Instagram, we identify three overlapping orientations to the Like button: affective, relational, and infrastructural. We show how the flexibility of the button creates ambiguity around the meaning of a Like which drives practices of metaevaluation, and argue that the platform architecture incentivizes an economic approach to evaluation that crowds out other value schemas, shaping how artists use the platform, make art, and even understand themselves. We conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of everyday evaluations, algorithms, and platforms. How are you feeling? What do you think about this? Would you like to see more? Questions a close friend might ask have been incorporated into the very infrastructure of online platforms. We are invited to review products purchased and services received, to rate the latest television show or blockbuster movie, and to Like posts on social media with the click of a button or the tap of a screen.

This article deals with choice-inducing algorithms-algorithms that are explicitly designed to affect people's choices. Based on an ethnographic account of three Israeli data analytics companies, I explore how algorithms are being designed to drive people into choice making, and examine their co-constitution by an assemblage of specifically positioned human and nonhuman agents. I show that the functioning, logic, and even ethics of choice-inducing algorithms are deeply influenced by the epistemologies, meaning-systems, and practices of the individuals who devise and use them; and that such algorithms are similarly affected by inter-organizational relationships, by various nonhuman agents, and by changing geo-political contexts. I conclude by discussing the flexibility of choice-inducing algorithms, and by arguing that such algorithms are not programmed to induce specific choices, but to more generally, convert people into choosers, and thus, to algorithmically (re)create the modern need to choose. This article contributes to the growing literature on algorithms and culture, and to our understanding of choice making in contemporary life. At the same time, it provides a new vocabulary that offers to critically engage with algorithms and their power without losing sight of the often-very-specific contexts from which they arise.

In this paper we explore how digital marketers think about marketing in the age of Big Data surveillance, automatic computational analyses and algorithmic shaping of choice contexts. Our starting point is a contradiction at the heart of digital marketing namely that digital marketing brings about unprecedented levels of consumer empowerment and autonomy and total control over and manipulation of consumer decision-making. We argue that this contradiction of digital marketing is resolved via the notion of relevance, which represents what Fredric Jameson calls a symbolic act. The notion of the symbolic act lets us see the centering of relevance as a creative act of digital marketers who undertake to symbolically resolve a contradiction that cannot otherwise be resolved. Specifically, we suggest that relevance allows marketers to believe that in the age of surveillance capitalism, the manipulation of choice contexts and decision-making is the same as consumer empowerment. Put differently, relevance is the moment when marketing manipulation disappears and all that is left is the empowered consumer. To create relevant manipulations that are experienced as empowering by the consumer requires always-on surveillance, massive analyses of consumer data and hyper-targeted responses, in short, a persistent marketing presence. The vision of digital marketing is therefore a fascinating one: marketing disappears at precisely the moment when it extends throughout life without limit. Manipulate to Empower: Hyper-relevance and the contradictions of marketing in the age of surveillance capitalism. Abstract In this paper we explore how digital marketers think about marketing in the age of Big Data surveillance, automatic computational analyses and algorithmic shaping of choice contexts. Our starting point is a contradiction at the heart of digital marketing 1 namely that digital marketing brings about unprecedented levels of consumer empowerment and autonomy and total control over and manipulation of consumer decision-making. We argue that this contradiction of digital marketing is resolved via the notion of relevance, which represents what Fredric Jameson calls a symbolic act. The notion of the symbolic act lets us see the centering of relevance as a creative act of digital marketers who undertake to symbolically resolve a contradiction that cannot otherwise be resolved. Specifically, we suggest that relevance allows marketers to believe that in the age of surveillance capitalism, the manipulation of choice contexts and decision-making is the same as consumer empowerment. Put differently, relevance is the moment when marketing manipulation disappears and all that is left is the empowered consumer. To create relevant manipulations that are experienced as empowering by the consumer requires always-on surveillance, massive analyses of consumer data and hyper-targeted responses, in short, a persistent marketing presence. The vision of digital marketing is therefore a fascinating one: marketing disappears at precisely the moment when it extends throughout life without limit.

The growing ubiquity of algorithms in everyday life has prompted cross-disciplinary interest in what people know about algorithms. The purpose of this article is to build on this growing literature by highlighting a particular way of knowing algorithms evident in past work, but, as yet, not clearly explicated. Specifically, I conceptualize practical knowledge of algorithms to capture knowledge located at the intersection of practice and discourse. Rather than knowing that an algorithm is/does X, Y, or Z, practical knowledge entails knowing how to accomplish X, Y, or Z within algorithmically mediated spaces as guided by the discursive features of one's social world. I conceptualize practical knowledge in conversation with past work on algorithmic knowledge and theories of knowing, and as empirically grounded in a case study of a leftist online community known as "BreadTube.

Nosso objetivo neste artigo é apresentar e discutir a complexificação do processo de plataformização do jornalismo pelo Facebook, a partir da implementação do Facebook Journalism Project (FJP), em janeiro de 2017. Desde então, a plataforma vem se associando a novos e variados atores, ampliando suas frentes de atuação e se posicionando como uma coordenadora de atividades relacionadas às instituições jornalísticas. Ao mesmo tempo, continuou a se oferecer como infraestrutura para o desenvolvimento dos produtos e negócios jornalísticos. Ancorados nos Estudos de Plataforma e inspirados metodologicamente na Cartografia das Controvérsias, apresentamos o FJP e manifestações públicas de jornalistas, pesquisadores e outros atores interessados em sua implementação. A diversificação das parcerias, a inclusão de ações pedagógicas, a renegociação das dimensões prescritivas e normativas que orientam as instituições jornalísticas, e a consolidação da plataforma como infraestrutura são algumas das questões discutidas ao final do artigo.

Hate speech and toxic communication online is on the rise. Responses to this issue tend to offer technical (automated) or non-technical (human content moderation) solutions, or see hate speech as a natural product of hateful people. In contrast, this article begins by recognizing platforms as designed environments that support particular practices while discouraging others. In what ways might these design architectures be contributing to polarizing, impulsive, or antagonistic behaviors? Two platforms are examined: Facebook and YouTube. Based on engagement, Facebook’s Feed drives views but also privileges incendiary content, setting up a stimulus–response loop that promotes outrage expression. YouTube’s recommendation system is a key interface for content consumption, yet this same design has been criticized for leading users towards more extreme content. Across both platforms, design is central and influential, proving to be a productive lens for understanding toxic communication.

Under conditions of so-called Platform Capitalism, software and algorithms undertake the important task of designing the interaction amongst online users and establishing criteria of relevance for content. As such, they operate as curatorial agents of platforms' content, establishing what is there to see, know and consume. This state of affairs calls for a revision of the traditional role of the (human) curator who is confronted with an online environment characterised by the unprecedented collision of commercial, aesthetic, cultural and political interests. The question of what kind of relationship the curator shall create with the algorithm then becomes crucial: is this a relationship of antagonism, resistance or alliance? How do these two curatorial agents influence each other? In this article, I analyse a cluster of hybrid artistic and curatorial experiments (including my own curatorial work) that foregrounds online platforms as discrete modes of socio-technical assemblages that curate particular forms of connectivity amongst networks of users, data layers and technical infrastructures. By doing so, I argue for the forging of strategic alliances between human and machinic curators as a strategy to channel new forms of creativity and cooperation under conditions of Platform Capitalism and to operationalise human-algorithmic curation as a political and aesthetic practice within the networked culture.

O artigo mapeia o significado e as qualidades atribuídas ao “dado” nos documentos destinados aos usuários e investidores da Fitbit, terceira maior plataforma no setor global de vestíveis. Foram analisados o relatório financeiro (IPO) do primeiro ano da marca no mercado de ações, os termos de uso e privacidade. Os documentos foram explorados no softwareAtlas.ti. Os resultados indicam que, embora os discursos endereçados ao cliente coloquem o dado como um benefício para o usuário, as narrativas dirigidas aos investidores destacam como riscos para o negócio: a garantia de segurança e privacidade dos usuários, os interesses governamentais no acesso aos dados e as políticas de regulação. O nosso argumento central é de que as narrativas oficiais constroem um imaginário do dado enquanto truque retórico, ocultando a rede político-econômica da marca, os riscos e as agendas de interesse ao passo que enaltecem as práticas de dataficação necessárias ao modelo de negócio da plataforma

This commentary is part of Salter MB (ed) et al. (2019) Horizon Scan: Critical security studies for the next 50 years. Security Dialogue 50(4_suppl): 9-37.

Digital data matter for (in)security practice. And yet they remain ‘neglected things’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) in critical studies on security. Certainly, critical security studies regularly enquires into the deployment of data-driven systems and the power rationalities that they foster (Amoore, 2013; Bigo, 2014; De Goede, 2018). However, critical security studies remains primarily concerned with the diverse techniques for governing through data. Critical security studies scholars fail to explore the politics underpinning the becoming of data as (in)security things. We should further explore how data are objectified as (in)security data, and how this affects our own subjectification.

This article conceptualizes algorithmic consumer culture, and offers a framework that sheds new light on two previously conflicting theorizations: that (1) digitalization tends to liquefy consumer culture and thus acts primarily as an empowering force, and that (2) digitalized marketing and big data surveillance practices tend to deprive consumers of all autonomy. By drawing on critical social theories of algorithms and AI, we define and historicize the now ubiquitous algorithmic mediation of consumption, and then illustrate how the opacity, authority, non-neutrality, and recursivity of automated systems affect consumer culture at the individual, collective, and market level. We propose conceptualizing 'algorithmic articulation' as a dialectical techno-social process that allows us to enhance our understanding of platformbased marketer control and consumer resistance. Key implications and future avenues for exploring algorithmic consumer culture are discussed.