Contesting the Algorithmic Imaginary, Decolonizing the Digital

Over the past decade, critics have questioned how algorithms organize digital ecosystems and produce social relations in media, politics, and society. In their work, these critics complicated public understandings of algorithms—reliant on ideas about objectivity, neutrality, and scientific precision—to reveal the human logics, biases, and fallacies programmed into these computational codes. Crucial to this new work has been Tarleton Gillespie's (2014: 192) assessment that algorithms are a "a new knowledge logic" and "the latest socially constructed and institutionally managed mechanism for assuring public acumen." Recent scholars have extended this line of inquiry by examining the social effects of programming logics in computational, digital, and internet technologies. These studies, from academics like Virginia Eubanks (2017), have observed how algorithms participate in automating modern forms of economic and racial inequality. Safiya Umoja Noble (2018), specifically, has detailed how algorithms produced new systems of technological redlining by reifying racial and sexual stereotypes about Black girls through search engines. Noble's work, significantly, cuts against the rhetoric of empowerment typically built into social media and internet platforms that rely on ideas of algorithmic curation as part of a quasi-democratic sense of personal media customization. Through such work, recent studies of algorithms frequently read these operations as modern tools for corporate expansion and societal control, made particularly compelling because of their associations with global tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and TikTok.Intervening in these debates, recent studies have begun to imagine and chronicle the alternative histories and practices of algorithms as tools for more liberatory politics. Specifically, micha cárdenas's Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media is remarkable for how it recuperates the communicative capacities of digital technologies for trans advocacy, despite their historical roots in the socioeconomic dimensions of global, racial capitalism. Her work thus joins recent trans digital studies from Jian Neo Chen (2019); Nicole Erin Morse (2022); and Z Nicolazzo, Alden C. Jones, and Sy Simms (2022). Underscoring the intersectional critiques of algorithms, cárdenas appeals for scholars not to cede "the power of algorithms to oppressive forces," arguing for the urgency of contesting these critical tools for analysis and expression (14). In certain respects, cárdenas's book builds on her past practice-based research projects, which included Autonets (2011–14), Pregnancy (2015), and Redshift and Portalmetal (2015), and puts them in conversation with creative work from the Peruvian artist Giuseppe Campuzano and video game designer Mattie Brice. Poetic Operations is particularly notable for its materialist approach to social justice that distills a set of poetic practices used by trans people of color to consider their speculative applications for imagining safer digital futures. Echoing Rita Felski (2015), Poetic Operations appeals for a broader academic movement to move beyond negative critique and envision a new algorithmic imaginary.To do this, cárdenas's argument highlights the predigital histories of algorithms as forms of ritual and technological practice. This move begins her broader conversation in reimagining the power of algorithms in a time when violence toward trans people of color has intensified since a 2014 explosion in public visibility. Even as journalists and scholars have worked to demonstrate the embedded racist logics in facial recognition systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital search and advertising, cárdenas refuses to forfeit the algorithmic future to the racial, gender, and sexual violence posed by lingering colonial projects. Urgently, she asks us to consider how algorithms might become tools for analysis, expression, and survival. Out of this question, she develops her own understanding of cutting, shifting, and stitching as vital elements in a repertoire of trans of color poetics. Building on Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant's notion of poetics as an "expressive material force that flows, with political impact, between people and cultures," cárdenas examines how these poetic capacities of digital art and technology can reduce violence against trans people of color "by interrupting colonial control of embodiment, modulating perceptibility, fostering transformation, and building solidarity" (4). To support what she calls an algorithmic analysis, cárdenas shifts how we imagine algorithms as a tool for critical study in theorizing social formations like race and gender. She works to identify three principal methods for algorithmic analysis: (1) "the identification of operations and operators, a method of breaking down a problem into its basic elements and instructions"; (2) "the analysis of existing algorithms in media and technology, including reverse engineering"; and (3) "the creation of new algorithms, in functional computer programming languages, pseudocode, or code poetry" (7).By pioneering new methods of algorithmic analysis, cárdenas challenges narrow engineering definitions of algorithms to encompass a more "indeterminate, poetic application" capable of attending to nonbinary genders and intersectionality, aspects sometimes still ignored within trans studies and the broader humanities (8). One way that cárdenas situates this idea is by attending to the poetic dimensions of the term trans*. She argues that this asterisk can be thought in algorithmic terms as a digital command line that provides expanded possibilities for searching trans-identification within databases to include transgender, transsexual, and trans nonbinary, among other identities. As cárdenas summarizes it, this practice of algorithmic logic provides a stronger reflection of "the multiplicity of embodiments that have come together in coalition in the contemporary trans movement," as well as indicating "a possible futurity in which other forms of embodiment are also referenced by trans*" (11–12). Anticipating criticism, cárdenas, moreover, acknowledges the circumscribed application of this research for computer scientists and technologists who might seek more mathematical understandings of algorithms. Instead, she gestures toward how algorithms themselves can shape our understanding and support for the survival strategies of trans people of color (15). From this vantage, cárdenas's work is produced out of a genealogy of trans of color feminism that synthesizes Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's (1991) notion of intersectionality and Jasbir Puar's (2019) assemblage. cárdenas's synthesis argues for understanding the gender, racial, and class identities that inform trans of color subjectivity as machinic—both in the sense of many parts being in motion and in the varied relations among these parts (9). cárdenas's reading of algorithms revitalizes interdependent and syncretic models of identity formation that challenge existing graphic language like axes of identity. In this regard, Poetic Operations presents algorithms as a compelling metaphor for studying humanistic subjectivity by centering the multivariable and simultaneous dimensions of identity.Critically, cárdenas's book joins an ongoing conversation within trans studies to decolonize its practices of knowledge production by reexamining its racial assumptions. In the inaugural TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah (2014: 4) staked the reemergence of transgender studies over the past decade as moving beyond "the traditional framing of transgender phenomena as appropriate targets of medical, legal, and psychotherapeutic intervention." This reassessment underscores how social science disciplines were historically weaponized to exert colonial force on the gendered expressions of racialized people. Stryker and Currah have worked to situate this critical area of study as an attempt to contest normative forms of knowledge production that historically interpolated the lives of trans* people within a set of specific power relations from anti-crossdressing laws, economic austerity, and other gender regimes through legal apartheid. Overall, this critical practice has meant decentering the Northern, white, anglophone bias of trans scholarship in ways that echo Emma Pérez's (1999) attempts to center the "decolonial imaginary" to reconceptualize the history and future of Chicana women. In critical ways, cárdenas continues this critical impulse by disrupting the social and political critiques of algorithms in vogue over the past decade. She does this by showing how these critiques naturalize understandings of algorithms as only tools for violence, rather than a complex set of operations that trans people of color already employ in their daily lives.Poetic Operations is quite timely in how it speaks to the recent public scrutiny of trans visibility. As cárdenas draws inspiration from Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson's Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), she argues for new types of digital networks, infrastructures, and communities to organize for more just trans futures. The methods that cárdenas pioneers are not only compelling but worthy of commendation. She synthesizes critical studies of algorithms with poetic analyses of digital art, communication technologies, and video game design to confront the political questions of our time. cárdenas's ongoing dialogue with Achille Mbembe's notion of necropolitics will be of particular interest to scholars invested in decolonizing the present and advocating safer futures for trans people of color. Mbembe's (2003: 18–23) "Necropolitics" solidified our attention to the links between modernity and mass systems of violence, particularly in how European logics of civilizational hierarchy rationalized colonial violence using industrial technologies. Against this grain, Poetic Operations reinvents our conceptions of algorithms in ways that pose potential breaks from this techno-history of modernity. As digital connectivity has helped engineer a new social panic about trans people, cárdenas deftly constructs a new algorithmic imaginary, one that contains possibilities for trans survival, expression, and justice.