Politics of the Algorithm: Technologies, Powers, Theories

Abstract

The introduction to the monographic section Politics of the Algorithm: Technologies, Powers, Theories, examines the nexus between technology and politics from the way in which the former, and algorithm-driven technologies in particular, has irreversibly invested the institutional and social coordinates within which the modern political canon has been constituted, activating a historical threshold in which the forms of social relations of domination change, the possibilities of their contestation by men and women who are placed in different positions in societal relations are determined, and the semantics of power is redefined overall. The "politics of the algorithm" concerns how social relations are embedded in technology and, consequently, are reproduced, legitimized and institutionalized by technology. Its study should therefore be placed within the framework of constitutional history, which, at the point of connection between social and conceptual history, opens up the field of a conceptual history of technology.