Self-Identity and Algorithmic Modernity: On Switching, Swerving and Lurching

Can we detect changes in the way that the individual subject reacts to, and copes with, institutional and cultural transformations arising from the digital revolution? Can we discern changes in the deep affective structures of the subject as the world turns into pervasive predictive technologies? This paper addresses these questions. The first part of the paper argues that a metamorphosis is occurring in the economy and society, based on revisiting the debate over artificial intelligence. In the second part of the paper, I go on to argue that this new world requires a different theorization of modernity, one that specifically addresses digitalization, automation, and predictive technologies in its orientation. Here I outline the theory of "algorithmic modernity" which I have developed over recent years. These lines of inquiry open the way towards another interrogation: what, then, is the transformation of the human subject in conditions of algorithmic modernity? I broach this question in the final section of the paper by introducing new conceptual terminology. Not so very long ago, the terms "human-in-the-loop" and "human-AI collaboration" were widely discussed in computer science, human-machine interaction studies, and other scientific discourses (Crootof et al., 2023; Kyriakou & Otterbacher, 2023). All of this talk of the posthuman and the post-machine subject, however, has served as a pseudo-theoretical cover story, an evasion of the central task of rethinking the relation between self and technology in the current age (Braidotti, 2013; de Freitas & Curinga, 2015). I broach the question of transformations of the subject by using various social-theoretical topographies, and I go on to argue that it is in experimental life-projects of switching, swerving and lurching that we can detect fundamental shifts in the state of the subject today.