Hannah Arendt and the Rise of Algorithmic Governance in the Digital Age

• In Event: Arendt between Past and Future

Abstract

This paper explores how the political thought of Hannah Arendt can help us appreciate the contemporary relevance and conceptual implications of algorithmic systems and big data for our understandings of politics and agency. It does so by interrogating these now ubiquitous features of the digital age against the backdrop of Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) and the theoretical categories deployed by Arendt across her larger body of work to analyze what she called the ‘Rise of the Social’ in the modern age. The increasingly wider application of algorithms has triggered recent debates regarding transparency and accountability in the deployment of data-driven approaches to public policy. These mechanisms not only feature predominately into everyday consumer activities—most obviously shaping our purchasing decisions as well as entertainment and social media consumption—but have also been widely used to support background checks and credit scoring, thereby impacting access to such basic resources as employment, insurance, financial loans, and housing. Increased concerns have been raised by the application of social algorithmic systems to fundamental domains of government, such as immigration and border control, as well as policing and criminal justice, driving crime-forecasting programs as well as the use of these technologies in informing judicial decision-making, including sentencing and parole. These developments have been framed as presenting a series of unprecedented challenges to contemporary democracies, potentially undermining the political agency of citizens and the requirements of the rule of law. However, I argue that the apparent novelty of the issues introduced by social algorithmic systems and the growing prominence of ‘data science governance’ obscures how the deeper philosophical challenges these developments raise to our notions of agency, freedom, and judgment, can be viewed as continuous with far earlier historical developments - specifically the modern emergence of a ‘stochastic worldview’ (Hacking, 1990) and the subsequent ‘discovery of society’ (Polanyi, 1944) as a field of study and intervention. Drawing on Arendt’s account, alongside the interventions of Foucault and Polanyi, I show how this broader historical process troubles or complicates our traditional political concepts and that the growing application of algorithmic systems represents a considerable intensification of these fundamental challenges that requires our theoretical attention. In doing so, I consider the implications inherent in policy makers, politicians, and citizens having come to accept such approaches as a component of structuring or governing our societies. The paper addresses this set of issues by analyzing the implications of our contemporary situation through an Arendtian framework and examining how such developments tend to upend the notions of ‘public’ and the ‘private’, erode the division between ‘action’ and ‘work’, as well significantly complicate our conceptions of agency and political responsibility.

Author

• Kiran Banerjee, University of Toronto