The Problem of Code: Difference, Identity and Reproduction in the Age of Algorithms

Abstract

The essay discusses the feminist critiques of the relationship between the digital code and masculine domination proposed by Sadie Plant in Zeroes and Ones (1997) and by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein in Data Feminism (2020). These critiques are situated within the historical and political turning point of the affirmation of the neoliberal programme, when identity politics and the capitalist valorization of differences reconfigure modern political universalism. To account for this transition and the function of algorithms as social operators, three different interpretations of the problem of the code – constitutionalist, historical and sociological – are then examined, with the aim of testing the feminist critiques articulated by Plant, D'Ignazio and Klein against the algorithmic processes of social reproduction of identities.