Culture of Algorithms

• In Event: 193 - Regular Session. Sociology of Culture

Abstract

Algorithms have a vastly increase presence in financial markets, and they are also increasingly the understructure of many other industries. In the past, financial traders saw algorithms as their "tools" and trading was "high human touch." But algorithms developed through various evolutionary stages, to the degree where 60% of stock market transactions in the US are now executed by algorithms, they are "algo touch" The first generation of algorithms learned from humans, the second from theories-- this is when algorithms began to move beyond trying to imitate the behavior of experienced traders. The third generation became reflexive—algorithms learned to examine and use data and "read" news, and make their own trading decisions. This paper examines this development and asks what a posthuman culture in which human traders and algorithms are both "actors" may look like, what the differences are attributed to the two types of subjectivities involved, and what engagements and attractions between them develop. It draws on ongoing fieldwork on the trading floors of big banks which algorithms co-inhabit.

Author

• Karin D. Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago