Recently, several works on automatic society and algorithmic governance have been published. A recent book by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, on this same subject and the consequences of automation on the social organization of employment and work (Fayard, 2015), raised some reflections that I am going to share with the reader.
1. The digital revolution is increasingly confused with the advent of the automatic society and the automation, if you will, of the automatic calculation processes and procedures that some call algorithmic society.
What then is the governance of algorithmic society about? From technological platforms, from social networks, from raw data extracted from these networks in the form of infra-personal signals, from calculation procedures and statistical correlations with a view to the formation of behavior patterns.
2. At the structural level, the governance of algorithmic society feeds on a complex informational environment, a cyberculture, from which the hyper-intelligence of technological devices (smartification) and the management of the BigData and Cloud Computing and, obviously, the “digital addition” that all this complex causes among users.
3. In terms of knowledge, the governance of algorithmic society “knows how to deal better” with complexity, this is “its truth”, that is, it manages an objectivity pasted and extracted from reality, produced in real time and successively reconfigured by an immense mass of permanently updated data.
4. At the operational level, the management of the system BigData cleans, sorts, categorizes and algorithmically calculates the data collected on social networks. It doesn't matter the context, the uniqueness, the meaning of these data.
Individuals are mere “temporary aggregates of raw data”, quantifiable and successively reconfigured on an industrial scale, if we like, a kind of objectification of individuals.
For the rest, everything is indexed to any quantitative indicator, according to the objectives and purposes of the hypercompetitive and performative society in which we live.
5. In terms of critical theory, we are faced with a kind of "extractive model" in which Internet citizens, users of networks and platforms, are producers and suppliers of a huge mass of personal information, much of it subliminal, in a dizzying and informational environment. hypnotic, which has both benignity and toxicity. This is a topic of enormous sensitivity as it concerns the management of citizens' privacy.
6. In terms of power relations, the governance of algorithmic society is apparently a new way of managing political uncertainty and insecurity; however, it proceeds by inverting the terms of the equation, that is, it is the means (the technical and technological system) that take care of the ends; as political, social and legal innovation runs much more slowly, there is a risk of becoming a prisoner of the high toxicity of algorithmic society.
7. In terms of territorial metrics, the governance of algorithmic society allows us to introduce and distinguish two important metrics: the territories-zone (TZ) metric and the territories-network metric (TR).
The first refers to the hierarchical power of conventional territories, the second to the horizontal or lateral power of intelligent territories that cultivate collective intelligence through new digital platforms.
The new territorial collectives, through collaborative platforms and a “new economy of common goods” are a hope for all territories, especially the most disadvantaged ones.
8. On the cognitive and conceptual level, the governance of algorithmic society, in its calculating exuberance, transforms algorithms into cognitive prostheses, which cause not only the externalization of the ,but also the proletarianization of some many professional and intellectual classes.
In this sense, the algorithmic society is therefore a highly paradoxical society with numerous political and cultural conflicts on the near horizon.
9. At the level of the individual subject, our “double algorithms” can be very useful if we know how to manipulate them for our benefit; in the rest, our trail, our traceability, will be exhaustively explored in order to produce supra-individual patterns that “anticipate and guide” our behavior, all guaranteed by algorithmic governance and rationality.
10. Finally, in terms of the social organization of employment and work, as we still know it today, the algorithmic society of automation is a truly disruptive technology, that is, it creates, in the short term, strong structural unemployment.
But it is also, and despite everything, a great opportunity for social and political innovation that will, I am sure, hitch a ride in the same automatic and algorithmic society.
Final grade
Having arrived here, I'm sure that, behind the technological exuberance, the economy of applications and entrepreneurs startups, there is also a silent revolution in progress, the revolution of common sense, collective intelligence and conviviality.
Therefore, the collaborative society, the economy of the 4th sector (gift, volunteering, communion, contribution), the organization of collaborative common goods, social and complementary currencies, territorial collective intelligence and the formation of network actors, the basic income of existence (the great utopia of the XNUMXst century), the full application of the principles of the circular economy and a profoundly creative and innovative new organization of work.
In the same sense, in a time of cyberculture, automatic society and algorithmic governance, there is an essential debate that remains to be done, namely, that which refers to the causal relationships between the metric of digital networks and the metric of hierarchical territories, especially political -administrative, especially the most remote and disadvantaged territories in the interior of the country.
Now that a national territorial cohesion program is being discussed in Portugal, what can the digital society, online communities and algorithmic governance do for the real communities that inhabit “the hidden country”?
Abandon, reoccupy?
We will have to come back to the subject more often.
Author António Covas is a full professor at the University of Algarve and a PhD in European Affairs from the Free University of Brussels
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