Saturday, July 23, 2022

"Beyond Surveillance: How Do Markets and Algorithms "Think"?"

This piece can be a bit of a slog but any writer willing to include the sentence: "The first line of inquiry I would like to develop connects to a central point Foucault makes in his reading of German Ordoliberalism..." is either crazy enough to turn off 95% of his possible audience and/or, he might be on to something.

From the journal GENEALOGY+CRITIQUE, volume 3, issue 1, 2017:

Abstract
This paper draws on Foucault's work to inspire and inform a conceptual investigation into the relationship between economic thinking, in particular concerning markets, and contemporary computing. This investigation takes the form of three intellectual probes. The first of these probes applies to the computer's capacity to lower transaction costs, the second proceeds through the framing of markets (and algorithms) as places of truth, and the third draws on Deleuze's reading of Foucault to inquire into the notion of order and ordering. Together, the three lines of inquiry attempt to outline an encounter between Foucault's thinking and computing that moves beyond the question of surveillance in favor of an emphasis on questions of epistemology.

Keywords: computing, epistemology, markets, neoliberalism, order, Deleuze, Foucault

How to Cite: Rieder, Bernhard. "Beyond Surveillance: How Do Markets and Algorithms 'Think'?" Le foucaldien 3, no. 1 (2017): 1–20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.30 [Note: In 2022, Le foucaldien relaunched as Genealogy+Critique.]

....MUCH MORE