ALGORITHMIC IMAGINATIONS: RETHINKING “ALGORITHMIC” AS A HEURISTIC FOR UNDERSTANDING COMPUTATIONALLY-STRUCTURED CULTURE

How we imagine our place within the structure of sociotechnical-humanrelationships—specifically, in domains of life affected by data-analytics and theprobabilistic bets institutions and people in power make on the future of our creditworthiness, political leanings, shopping habits etc.—is our “algorithmic imagination.” Thepurpose of this panel is to explore the “algorithmic imagination” as it manifests inparticular scholarly, historical, socio-cultural, and technical contexts. The panelistsprioritize how social actors, situated in distinct settings, go about constructing an“algorithmic imagination” in conversation/opposition with how computational systems have“imagined” them; they will also reflect critically and self-reflexively on the implicationsof an algorithmic imagination, so conceived. Collectively, the panelists demure frommonolithic understandings of the “algorithmic imagination” while also embracing algorithmicintersectionality. The primary contention of this panel is that the ways in which algorithmshave been “thought,” or imagined, have made it difficult to conceive of practicablestrategies for transforming algorithmic cultures and, indeed, for delinking them from bothstate and corporate control. The panel, thus, makes three primary contributions. First, wesituate, define, and distinguish the concept, “algorithmic imagination.” Second, the panelprovides analyses of key facets of the algorithmic imagination, in specific historicalsettings and life-worlds defined by intersectionality. Lastly, it aims to contribute,however provisionally, to a political theory that recognizes the deterministic power ofcomputational systems but rejects the notion that power is inherently democratic ormonolithically insurmountable.