{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","title":"If...Then Algorithmic Power and Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2017054909","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","id":"1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","uuid":"1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","title":"If...Then Algorithmic Power and Politics","normalized_title":"ifthenalgorithmicpowerandpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2017054909","isbns":["2017054909","9780190493042","9780190493059"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":211,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/If...Then%20Algorithmic%20Power%20and%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053/search"},"page":{"printed_page":116,"pdf_page":126,"physical_index":126,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"96c662f659fabac58350e60ff4e63bfe88a44324e6d3848294e8481a30027aa2"},"chapter":"IF...THEN","content":"Conclusion\n\nEveryday encounters with algorithms constitute an important site for analyzing the power and politics of algorithms in a way that does not necessarily assume a topdown or macroscopic view of power. Instead, in this chapter I have focused on the micropolitics of powers that emerge in the lived afects of people as they encounter algorithmic forces in their online surroundings. Micropolitics becomes a useful concept for thinking about what these encounters generate. As events, these situated encounters “might have powerful consequences through the way that [they transform] relations of enablement and constraint” (Bissell,  2016: 397). It is not just that algorithms may constrain or enable people’s capacities to do things—for example, to be seen and heard online, to permit feelings to be felt or to prompt reactions and evaluations about one’s lived environments. The barely perceived transitions that occur in situated encounters are by no means unidirectional; people certainly constrain or enable the algorithm’s capacity to do things as well.\n\nThe algorithmic body—particularly, the one driven by machine learning—is characterized by its capacity to change as a result of an encounter. Just as people learn to navigate their whereabouts, algorithms learn and adapt to their surroundings as well. While we might not be able to ask the algorithm about its capacity to afect and be afected, its outcomes can certainly be read as traces of how it evaluates its encounters with the social world. It is important to understand the afective  encounters that people have with algorithms not as isolated events that are somehow outside the algorithm but as part of the same mode of existence. When people experience the Facebook algorithm as controlling, it is not that the actual news feed algorithm is powerful in the restrictive sense. In its perceived restrictive functionality, the algorithm also becomes generative of various evaluations, sensations and moods.\n\nIf power is to be understood relationally, then we must think about the encounters between algorithms and people as both adversarial and supportive. Power, Foucault reminds us, “traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network, which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression” (1980: 119). More than anything, then, power is a transformative capacity that always already implies forms of resistance (Foucault, 1978: 95). Resistance is not so much about the refusal to be governed by algorithms or to use a particular platform but about the practical engagement with an ascending force. The personal algorithm stories examined as part of this chapter are precisely indicative of such engagement. As Williams argued, people’s afective encounters with algorithms should not be read as “formally held or systematic beliefs” about algorithms but, rather, as generative of “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” (Williams, 1977: 23). Still at the cusp of semantic availability, these meanings, perceptions, and expectations cannot be adequately described as a social imaginary if we take that to mean a culture’s ethos or shared sense of understanding. As individual and idiosyncratic, these stories point to the more subtle conditions, ways of being and imaginaries that surround algorithms.\n\n116\n\nI F . . . T H E N","previous_page":115,"next_page":117}