Like the immanent form of power described by Foucault, Scot Lash sees new forms of capitalist power as “power through the algorithm” (Lemke, 2012: 17, emphasis mine). This is a form of power that works from below, not a power-over as it were. As such it becomes indistinguishable from life itself by sifting into “the capillaries of society” (Lash, 2007: 61). In his seminal article on algorithmic power in the age of social media, Beer builds on Lash’s notion of “post-hegemonic” forms of power to argue that the algorithms underpinning social media platforms “have the capacity to shape social and cultural formations and impact directly on individual lives” (2009: 994). Drawing on the example of Last.fm, a music-sharing platform, Beer argues that the power of the algorithm can be seen in the ways that the platform provides users with their own taste-specific online radio station. Power, in others words, stems from the algorithm’s capacity to “shape auditory and cultural experiences” (2009: 996). This notion of power through the algorithm does not treat power as hierarchical or one-directional but, rather, as immanent to life itself. Algorithmic power in this sense can be understood as a force, energy, or capacity of sorts (Lash, 2007). This way of understanding power as immanent is, perhaps, most famously reflected in Foucault’s notion of power as an omnipresent feature of modern society in which power relations are not seen as repressive but as productive (Lemke, 2012: 19).22
Others have argued that algorithms have an intrinsic power to regulate social lives through their “autonomous decision-making” capacity (Diakopoulos, 2015: 400). Here, power seems to be located in the mechanics of the algorithm. According to Nick Diakopoulos, algorithmic power stems from the “atomic decisions that algorithms make, including prioritization, classification, association, and filtering” 2015: 400, emphasis in the original). As such, algorithms exert power by making decisions about the ways in which information is presented, organized, and indicated as being important. As filtering devices, algorithms make decisions about what information to include and exclude, constituting a new form of gatekeeping (Bozdag, 2013; Helberger et al., 2015; Napoli, 2015).23 In contrast to the rhetoric surrounding the early days of the Web, which often heralded the Internet’s potential for doing away with hierarchy by giving everyone a voice, scholars now worry that algorithms are assuming gatekeeping roles that have a significant efect on the way public opinion is formed ( Just & Latzer, 2016). Worries about algorithms diminishing the democratic potential of the public sphere—for example, by creating filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011; Zuiderveen et al., 2016) or manipulating what information is shown to the public in the first place (Tufekci, 2015)—are frequently framed in more traditional terms as forms of domination or power seen as hierarchical and top-down. In this sense, algorithms are seen as having power over somebody or something. As Frank Pasquale writes in his recent book The Black Box Society, search engines and social networks, by way of their capacity to include, exclude, and rank, have “the power to ensure that certain public impressions become permanent, while others remain fleeting” (2015: 14). In Foucault’s terms, this would be power seen as a form of political, social and economic domination, where one entity prevents another from seeing or doing something. As Pasquale puts it, “we have given the search sector an almost unimaginable power to determine what we see, where we spend, how we perceive” (2015: 98). However, framing algorithms as having power over someone or something risks losing sight of the human decision-making processes and programming that precedes any algorithmic operation. When Pasquale notes that we have given power to the search sector, he does not simply mean the algorithms running Google. Yet, there is a tendency to use algorithm as a placeholder for a much more distributed form of power. As I argue in this book, critical inquiry into algorithmic forms of power and politics should always extend any claim of algorithms having power. As I will elaborate in in the next chapter, the question of whom or what power most obviously belongs to cannot be conclusively answered. Instead, what can be examined are algorithms in practice, the places and situations through which algorithms are made present and take on a life of their own.
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IF . . . THEN