If the pol­i­tics of many of these algo­rithms is com­monly located on a spec­trum between autoc­racy and delib­er­a­tive…

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If the pol­i­tics of many of these algo­rithms is com­monly located on a spec­trum between autoc­racy and delib­er­a­tive democ­racy, I think we could start to dis­cuss the lim­i­ta­tions of those approaches. In Mouffe’s words, “when we accept that every con­sen­sus exists as a tem­po­rary result of a pro­vi­sional hege­mony as a sta­bi­liza­tion of power that always entails some form of exclu­sion, we can begin to envis­age the nature of a demo­c­ra­tic pub­lic sphere in a dif­fer­ent way.”

And so I think we reach her strongest argu­ment for why think­ing about ago­nism is impor­tant. This is why a plu­ral­ist democ­racy, she writes, “needs to make room for dis­sent, and for the insti­tu­tions through which it can be man­i­fested. It’s sur­vival depends on col­lec­tive iden­ti­ties form­ing around clearly dif­fer­en­ti­ated posi­tions, as well as on the pos­si­bil­ity of choos­ing between real alter­na­tives.” And I think that’s a fairly key con­cept here.

So this is why it mat­ters whether algo­rithms can be ago­nist, given their roles in gov­er­nance. When the logic of algo­rithms is under­stood as auto­cratic, we’re going to feel pow­er­less and pan­icked because we can’t pos­si­bly inter­vene. If we assume that they’re delib­er­ately demo­c­ra­tic, we’ll assume an Internet of equal agents, ratio­nal debate, and emerg­ing con­sen­sus posi­tions, which prob­a­bly doesn’t sound like the Internet that many of us actu­ally rec­og­nize.

So instead, per­haps if we started to think about this idea of ago­nis­tic plu­ral­ism, we might start to think about the way in which algo­rithms are choos­ing from coun­ter­posed per­spec­tives within a field where ratio­nal­ity and emo­tion are given. As an ethos, it assumes per­pet­ual con­flict and con­stant con­tes­ta­tion. It would ide­ally offer the path to choose, I think, away from these dis­ap­point­ingly lim­ited calls for “trans­parency” in algo­rithms, which are ulti­mately kind of doomed to fail, given that com­pa­nies like Facebook and Twitter are not going to give their algo­rithms away, for a whole host of com­pet­i­tive rea­sons, and also because they’re afraid of users gam­ing the sys­tem.

Instead, I think to rec­og­nize value of dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives and oppos­ing inter­ests involves an accep­tance of what Howarth calls “the rules of the game” and an under­stand­ing that algo­rithms are par­tic­i­pants in wider insti­tu­tional and cap­i­tal­ist log­ics.

–Can an Algorithm Be Agonistic? Ten Scenes about Living in Calculated Publics - Kate Crawford - Open Transcripts (vianataliekane)