The Social Life of Algorithms - II

Abstract

Algorithms play a central role in allocating resources (financial trading programs, credit scores); regulating movement through space (speed cameras, automated flight control systems and, maybe in the future, self-driving cars); sorting and ranking people (university rankings, college admission algorithms, resume judging software); policing and surveillance (facial recognition software, police crime prediction protocols, polygraph scoring software); military strikes (target acquisition codes, initiatives to create autonomous drones); forming mediascapes (Facebook feeds, Twitter trollbots); and shaping leisure (online dating sites, Spotify algorithms, and the production of “deep fakes”).

The key mediating, bridging, and shaping role of algorithms in all their multiplicity demands empirical mapping and theoretical explication. Questions of interest include: how are algorithms deployed in such a way as to erase the agency of their designers? How do their designers understand their work? How are cultural assumptions secreted and naturalized within algorithms? How do algorithms often fortify pre-existing relations of power and how might they be architected to subvert them? How are algorithms used to manage risk and how might they create new unseen risks? How does the deployment and understanding of algorithms vary across cultures? How do algorithms get internalized and produce new subjectivities? How might algorithms be contested in the service of democratizing processes? Answers to these questions and suggestions of further questions are welcome.

Individual Presentations

• Medical and Public Health Algorithms as Colonizing Tools - Jorge Benavides-Rawson, George Washington University

• Algorithms that Empower? ACS and the Future of Intelligence Analysis - Kathleen Vogel, Prof.

• #Insta-Environment: Measuring the Effects of Instagram's Algorithm on Climate Change Communications - David Christopher Rheams, The University of Texas at Dallas

• Speed Cameras: An Appreciative Critique - Hugh Gusterson, George Washington University

• The Theater of Algorithmic Transparency in the French Public Sector - Loup Cellard, University of Warwick

Session Organizer

• Hugh Gusterson, George Washington University