Arendt and the Algorithm: Re-Reading the Human Condition in the Digital Age

• In Event: Democracy, Freedom, and Pluralism in the Digital Age

Abstract

This paper explores how political theory can help us appreciate the contemporary relevance and conceptual implications of algorithmic systems and big data for our understandings of politics and agency. It does so by interrogating these now ubiquitous features of the digital age against the backdrop of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) and the theoretical categories deployed by Arendt to analyze what she called the ‘Rise of the Social’ in the modern era. The increasingly wider application of algorithms has triggered recent debates regarding transparency and accountability in the deployment of data-driven approaches to public policy. However, I argue that the apparent novelty of the challenges raised by algorithmic systems and the growing prominence of ‘data science governance’ obscures how the deeper philosophical challenges these developments raise to our notions of agency, freedom, and judgment, are continuous with far earlier historical developments - specifically the modern emergence of a ‘stochastic worldview’ (Hacking, 1990) and the subsequent ‘discovery of society’ (Polanyi, 1944) as a field of study and intervention. Drawing on Arendt’s account, alongside the interventions of Foucault and Polanyi, I show how this broader historical process troubles or complicates our traditional political concepts and that the growing application of algorithmic systems represents a considerable intensification of these fundamental challenges that requires our theoretical attention. The paper addresses this demand primarily by analyzing the implications of our contemporary situation through an Arendtian framework in order to examine how we should approach the current political challenges raised by algorithmic systems today.

In the first part of the paper I begin by exploring the significance of the social algorithmic turn for contemporary society, emphasizing how an Arendtian lens might help disclose the experiential and phonological elements of this seemingly novel registry of activity. In doing so, I focus my attention on the specifically normative implications of algorithms and the ways they appear to challenge or undermine our notions of political agency and judgment. From here, the paper shifts to unpacking how this context can be re-framed as continuous with earlier transformations related to the rise of modern society, and therefore deeply related to what Arendt famously described as the rise of the social. In this section of the paper I reconstruct the key features of such a ‘pre-history’ of our current ‘algorithmic age’ to show how this prior context can be taken to anticipate and pre-figure many of the dilemmas that accompany our contemporary apprehensions regarding social algorithmic systems, ranging from the blurring of the domain of public and private, problematizing our notions of freedom and agency, and the introduction of novel forms of power and social control. In the final part of the paper I return to an Arendtian frame in order to assess the implications of the current rise of algorithms in our political lives by examining how such developments tend to upend the notions of ‘public’ and the ‘private’, erode the division between ‘action’ and ‘work’, as well significantly complicate our conceptions of agency and political responsibility. I conclude by suggesting some of the further questions this account raises for our contemporary situation in which algorithms now occupy only a rapidly growing role in our social and political lives.

Author

• Kiran Banerjee, University of Toronto