We Are Data: Algorithms and The Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold
Author:John Cheney-Lippold [Cheney-Lippold, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: COM087000 Computers / Digital Media / General
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2017-05-01T23:00:00+00:00
On Algorithmic Interpolation
The political act of making subject is famously, and rather overreliantly, described in philosopher Louis Althusserâs allegory of ideological interpellation. A cop yells, âHey, you!â and âhailsâ an individual. Like a frog to a prince, that individual turns into a subject, even before she hears âyou,â via the ideological apparatuses of the dominant class.46 But requisite in this communicative diagram is the act of self-recognitionâa becoming subject in response to the act of the other. While we may theoretically acknowledge our algorithmic identities, jus algoritmiâs black-boxed opacity means we wonât immediately encounter the hail of âcitizenship.â
Yet algorithmic identifications like jus algoritmi rarely hail users directly. They instead structure usersâ conditions of possibilities, be it their access to privacy rights, social relations, or knowledge itself. In this way, the process of making subject is indirect. It is a relation of power more akin to the psychoanalytical framework of theorist Jacques Lacanâwhich, as it happens, fundamentally influenced Althusserâs theoryâthan to the metaphorical potency of some overly salutational police officer.
In initial theorizations of Lacanâs âmirror stage,â he proposed that infants become unified individuals upon recognition of themselves as an object in a mirror and thus begin to identify themselves with their own image.47 Or, as author Curtis White summarizes, ââIâ looks into the mirror and says, âI am that.ââ48 But Lacan soon expanded this stage into a more general interpretation of subjectivity: subject formation also occurs through our encounters with what he calls an âintrojectionâ of language, or the internalization of symbolic identification.49
More relevant to this chapter, information scholar Ronald Day broadens introjectionâs definition to âthe mental coding of the subject by cultural forms and social norms, forming unconscious systems of semantic forms and of rules and roles for expression.â50 The process of subjectification may not route through a direct heeding to power. It rather structures and mediates life (from language to culture and to social norms) by constantly retouching our own subjective positioning (of how language, culture, and social norms necessarily change).
For example, we can look to Dayâs own work on what he calls the âdocumentary subject.â This emergent subject relation positions individuals within a field of documents âabout something or someone, some object or some person.â âWanting to know about, in a documentary sense,â Day continues, âis wanting to understand something or someone within a context of a system of knowledge.â51 This focus on âaboutnessâ is helpful on many counts, not least of which is how Day wordplays a connection between Althusserâs âinterpellationâ and the statistical method of âinterpolation.â52
In an interpolative method, new data points are generated using patterns of existing data points (like predicting future behaviors on the basis of an existing data set). An interpolated subject, then, is not identified according to a preexisting, one-to-one relationship of oneâs self. Rather, that subject is understood in the context of statistical estimation that fills in the holes of existing data with new algorithmic approximation. Like Dayâs documentary subject, an interpolated subject is only talked about, not to. Ultimately, this
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