Power and the Institution of the Social

Political Perspectives on Algorithmic Governmentality

Abstract

This article addresses a specific aspect related to the consideration of the status of the political within the framework of contemporary technification: the exercise of power within the framework of what some Foucault-inspired literature refers to as governmentality, algorithmic management, or algorithmic governance—a new technology of power whose existence arises from the tangled convergence of capitalist globalization, datafication, digitization, and —finally— platformization. We are interested in examining what is labeled as algorithmic governmentality insofar as, on the one hand, it coexists with preceding technologies of power —often competing with them, and at other times collaborating with or guiding them— and, on the other hand, in terms of its productive and normative dimension: that is, to the extent that it intervenes in contemporary processes of subjectivation to define not only who we are, but also who we can be and what we can do.