In this chapter, I have suggested viewing these “ordinary afects,” to use Stewart’s term, as forming part of an algorithmic imaginary, understood as ways of thinking about what algorithms are and, perhaps more importantly, what they should be. While encounters between algorithms and people are generative of stories and certain beliefs about algorithms, these imaginations have a transformative capacity, too. In an important sense, then, it is not the algorithm, understood as coded instructions that enables or constrains actions but, rather, the perceptions and imaginations that emerge in situated encounters between people and algorithms—indeed, the algorithmic imaginary. If we want to understand the social power of algorithms, then, critiquing their workings is not enough. While algorithms certainly do things to people, people also do things to algorithms.
Affective Landscapes
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