Where do public values belong? A comment on value-making in algorithmic systems

This commentary takes up a question the article raises but does not settle: in what realm do public values belong? I attend to the distinction between first, society's values held by society as a whole and second, social values operated within specific and culturally embedded communities. I suggest that the ethnographic evidence presented in the article is oriented to the latter. Drawing on the processual theory of value that the authors invoke, I argue that public values are not held somewhere in complete and coherent form, and thus cannot be harmed or impaired by systems. Rather, they are made in the act of being invoked, and following this, the five disconnects can be understood as sites of value creation, rather than as sites of value depletion. To support this argument, I focus on the case of the negotiation of thresholds at the automated border.