The DOI matches its Crossref record; 35 of the 35 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Society of Algorithms
Open accessAbstract
The pairing of massive data sets with processes—or algorithms—written in computer code to sort through, organize, extract, or mine them has made inroads in almost every major social institution. This article proposes a reading of the scholarly literature concerned with the social implications of this transformation. First, we discuss the rise of a new occupational class, which we call the coding elite. This group has consolidated power through their technical control over the digital means of production and by extracting labor from a newly marginalized or unpaid workforce, the cybertariat. Second, we show that the implementation of techniques of mathematical optimization across domains as varied as education, medicine, credit and finance, and criminal justice has intensified the dominance of actuarial logics of decision-making, potentially transforming pathways to social reproduction and mobility but also generating a pushback by those so governed. Third, we explore how the same pervasive algorithmic intermediation in digital communication is transforming the way people interact, associate, and think. We conclude by cautioning against the wildest promises of artificial intelligence but acknowledging the increasingly tight coupling between algorithmic processes, social structures, and subjectivities.
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Citations
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Cited by
Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systems
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Chan, A., Ezell, C., Kaufmann, M., Wei, K., Hammond, L., Bradley, H., Bluemke, E., Rajkumar, N., Krueger, D., Kolt, N., et al. (2024) · The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3630106.3658948 · Cited by 84
Trust, trustworthiness and AI governance
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Beyond the author: Artificial intelligence, creative writing and intellectual emancipation
Tsao, J., & Nogues, C. (2024) · Poetics · doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2024.101865 · Cited by 67
Metadata
- Authors
- Burrell, J., & Fourcade, M.
- Venue
- Annual Review of Sociology
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 2021-07-31
- Volume
- 47
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 213-237
- ISSN
- 0360-0572 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-2115
- OpenAlex
- W3167983954
- Cited by
- 430
- References
- 35
- FWCI
- 14.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
