What, then, are we to make of the algorithm amid the condition of perpetual change? How can we know algorithms and the systems they are part of, if they are constantly changing? This book has suggested that neither the changing nature of the object nor the way it is engulfed in trade secrets and proprietary systems should be seen as a necessary deterrence. I have argued that our understanding of how algorithms shape everyday life is not inhibited by not knowing the thing, simply because the thing is always already “many quite diferent things” (Law, 2002: 15). In chapter 3 I ofered three methodological tactics one could apply in the analysis of algorithms. Each of these maps to how algorithms were examined in chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively. One approach serves as an aid in delineating how technologies materialize cultural imaginaries. Here, the notion of technography was presented as a way of interrogating algorithms as spatial and material arrangements that help to configure users in certain ways (chapter 4). Second, I proposed a phenomenological understanding of the productive force that people’s imaginaries of algorithms have for the practical engagement with their lived-in environment (chapter 5). The third (but by no means final) option was to think the material and the discursive together, by looking at the ways in which algorithms are diferently configured and made to mater in specific setings (chapter 6).
Developing an understanding of the power and politics of algorithmic media depends on acknowledging their “variable ontology.” As Introna and Wood contend, “we cannot with any degree of certainty separate the purely social from the purely technical, cause from efect, designer from user, winners from losers, and so on” (2004: 180). To counter the assumption that algorithms are essentially technological things or coded objects that can be easily delineated as separate entities, in this book I sought to examine what I have called the ontological politics of algorithms. Based on the manner in which notions of the machine, software, and artificial intelligence are bound up in and entangled with sociality, subjectivity, and social issues, the ontological politics of algorithms refers to the ways in which these categories are made diferentially relevant and available as part of specific configurations. The manyfoldedness of algorithms, moreover, raises the question of whether a distinction between knowing subjects and objects known is misguided to begin with. Perhaps, as Mol suggests, we are beter served by “spreading the activity of knowing widely” (2002: 50). In chapter 3 I therefore suggested a particular way of atending to the variable ontology of algorithms by shifting atention away from questions of ontology—of where agency is located and whom it most obviously belongs to—to questions of politics, of when agency is mobilized and to what end. In order to understand the power and politics of algorithms, there is a need to atend to the question of “when the algorithm is”?
The “when” of algorithms becomes particularly evident if we look at some of the recent public discussions concerning algorithmic systems that are perceived to have gone astray. Such public controversies reveal how algorithms are often materialized diferently depending on the seting. In the case of Facebook’s “trending topic controversy,” which hit the news in May 2016, human editors were accused of censoring conservative topics on the platform’s trending topic feature. The story was largely framed in terms of “biased” and “subjective” humans distorting the “neutral” and “objective” algorithms responsible for ranking and sorting Facebook’s trending topic feature. Interestingly, only a couple of months later, in early September 2016, Facebook became the target of another “algorithm controversy.” Yet this time, the algorithm was accused of doing the censoring. Several prominent members of the public, the then Norwegian prime minister, Erna Solberg, among them, expressed worries about the fact that Facebook’s news feed algorithms had deleted a famous Pulitzer Prize winning war photograph from people’s news feeds. As described in the previous chapter, the story culminated when the editor-in-chief of Norway’s national newspaper Aftenposten challenged (with great pathos) Mark Zuckerberg to take editorial responsibility for the algorithm’s actions. These controversies show how algorithms can be mobilized and materialized in diferent manners, depending on the specific constellations they are part of. Also, they demonstrate that we cannot with any degree of certainty separate the purely social from the purely technical—nor should we necessarily want to. In both of these cases there was an algorithmic system at play, including both humans and machines. If we want to understand questions of power and politics, then, it is not enough to look at one element only. Precisely because we are not dealing with two situations of radical diference but, rather, with situations were these diferences were made, an understanding of algorithmic power and politics must necessarily entail an examination of such boundary-making practices.
Algorithmic Life
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