Beyond the Digital Public Sphere: Towards a Political Ontology of Algorithmic Technologies

Abstract The following paper offers a political and philosophical reading of ethically informed technological design practices to critically tackle the implicit regulative ideal in the design of social media as a means to digitally represent the liberal public sphere. The paper proposes that, when it comes to the case of social media platforms, understood along with the machine learning algorithms embedded in them as algorithmic technologies, ethically informed design has an implicit conception of democracy that parallels that of Jürgen Habermas’ procedural democracy (Habermas, J. (1994). THREE NORMATIVE MODELS OF DEMOCRACY. Jurgen Habermas , 1 (1).). That is, that democratic practices are encodable as procedures that produce valid discussion forums. Opposed to this, this paper suggests a turn to philosopher Jacques Rancière’s conception of politics as a guiding attitude towards technological design. This is done by, on the one side, using Rancière’s notions of “disagreement” and “distribution of the sensible” as the political starting point for the practice of design of algorithmic technologies. And, on the other, inspired by Karen Barad’s theories on agential realism (Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , 28 (3), 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321 ), by putting forward a political ontology of algorithmic technologies that reconceptualizes them in terms of how they assemble open-ended practices between human bodies and technological devices.