Programmed sociality, then, implies a mutual reciprocity between machine and human, and the recognition that however life is shaped, responsibility is shared.6
The “if. . . then” conditional statements of algorithmic rules imply that certain conditions must be met in order to have particular consequences. But in order for algorithms to solve problems and have consequences, they are contingent on a wide variety of people, technologies, investments, and resources (Neyland & Möllers, 2017). Just as algorithms and platforms are perpetually changing, so are the worlds created in and around them. In other words, as the “if ” changes, so does the “then.” The way in which one can solve the problem of showing the “right content, to the right people, at the right time” is never set in stone. As the content changes, whom the content is right for might change as well. The right time for one person may be uterly wrong for someone else. When algorithms draw boundaries by deciding which of the 1,500 potential Facebook stories to make visible on a particular user’s news feed, such decisions are never made in isolation of people. When people make boundaries by atributing algorithmic outcomes to inferences made by a piece of computer code, these atributions rely on the material arrangements that let people make such claims to begin with.
If the machine is involved, then people are too. The notion of algorithmic power and politics is not about the ways in which algorithms determine the social world. Nor is it about what algorithms do in and of themselves. Rather, we have to ask how and when diferent aspects of the algorithmic are made available or unavailable to actors in a given seting. In looking at what constitutes an algorithmic life, the central question therefore becomes: who or what gets to be part of whatever is being articulated as the algorithm.
Algorithmic Life
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