The Multiplicity of Algorithms
Consider the following descriptions of what an algorithm is: “a step-by-step instruction of how to solve a task,” “a recipe,” “a form of programmed logic,” “made of people,” “code that tries to accommodate personal interests,” “an application that determines what you see,” “a type of technology,” “an automated filtering mechanism,” “what platforms use to guarantee the best user experience possible,” “an appetizer to make you crave for more of the same,” “magical.” You may already recognize some of these descriptions from standard computer science textbooks, common language, media reports, or from the way in which platforms market their algorithms. Indeed, these descriptions are the accounts of computer scientists, marketers, lay people, critics, journalists, or media users. These are the textbook definitions, tropes, PR slogans, tweets, folk theories, and popular descriptions of algorithms. Yet you may wonder, are these people describing the same thing? What does magic have to do with a recipe? Can something both determine what you see and accommodate your own interests?
This chapter suggests that algorithms are multiple in the sense that there is more than one kind of thing that we call “algorithm.” Not only is this true in the technical sense of there being many diferent types of algorithms but also in the social sense. When people speak of algorithms they often have diferent things in mind, diferent concerns, worries, conceptions, and imaginations. In a more theoretical and philosophical sense, one can talk of such multiplicity as “manyfoldedness, but not pluralism” (Mol, 2002: 84). Whereas plurality assumes that there is one stable thing and diferent perspectives one can take on that thing, to speak of manyfoldedness implies the idea that algorithms exist on multiple levels as “things done” in practice. In other words, algorithms can be magical and concrete, good and bad, technical and social. Yet, the notion of multiplicity also reminds us that puting it in such binary terms risks perpetuating an overly simplistic understanding of what algorithms are and what they can be. What is at stake, then, is the meaning of a variable existence for the ways in which we understand algorithmic power and politics. While I want to stress a view on algorithms that sees it not as one object (or subject, for that mater) but many, I shall first need to say a few things about the ways in which algorithms are commonly understood.
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