The ideas of power and politics I have in mind are both very broad, yet quite specific. For one, this book is not going to argue that algorithms have power. Sure, algorithms are powerful, but the ways in which this statement holds true cannot simply be understood by looking at the coded instructions telling the machine what to do. Drawing on the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1982; 1977) understanding of power as exercised, relational and productive, I intend to show how the notion of “algorithmic power” implies much more than the specific algorithm ranking e.g. a news feed. What I am going to argue is that the notion of algorithmic power may not even be about the algorithm, in the more technical sense of the term. Power always takes on many forms, including not only the ways in which it is exercised through computable instructions, but also through the claims made over algorithms. As such, we might say that algorithmic systems embody an ensemble of strategies, where power is immanent to the field of action and situation in question. Furthermore, following Foucault, power helps to produce certain forms of acting and knowing, ultimately pointing to the need for examining power through the kinds of encounters and orientations algorithmic systems seem to be generative of.
Neither are the “politics” of this book about politics with a capital P. I will not be discussing parliamentary politics, elections, campaigns, or political communication in the strictest sense. Rather, politics is understood in more general terms, as ways of world-making—the practices and capacities entailed in ordering and arranging different ways of being in the world. Drawing on insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), politics here is more about the making of certain realities than taking reality for granted (Mol, 2002; Moser, 2008; Law, 2002). In chapter 2 I will describe this form of politics of the real, of what gets to be in the world in terms of an “ontological politics” (Mol, 2002). In ranking, classifying, sorting, predicting, and processing data, algorithms are political in the sense that they help to make the world appear in certain ways rather than others. Speaking of algorithmic politics in this sense, then, refers to the idea that realities are never given but brought into being and actualized in and through algorithmic systems. In analyzing power and politics, we need to be atentive of the way in which some realities are always strengthened while others are weakened, and to recognize the vital role of nonhumans in co-creating these ways of being in the world. If . . . Then argues that algorithmic power and politics is neither about algorithms determining how the social world is fabricated nor about what algorithms do per se. Rather it is about how and when diferent aspects of algorithms and the algorithmic become available to specific actors, under what circumstance, and who or what gets to be part of how algorithms are defined.
Programmed Sociality
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