The contemporary Western world has been shaped if not actually born from the algorithm, it has been said. We live in a computational culture, more specifically an algorithmic culture, as Alexander Galloway pointed out more than a decade ago. One of the excellent New Economics Foundation reports puts it thus: “[algorithms] have morphed from curating online content to curating and influencing our lives.” Indeed, capitalism’s current financialized mode depends entirely on algorithmic calculation, as the basis of derivatives, high speed trading and the new fintech sector, for example. Platform capitalism relies on algorithmic machine learning and AI, as does manufacturing. Expert systems for medical diagnosis and robot surgery are built from algorithmic machine learning. Political campaigning exploits the micro-targeting of social media messages, as we have learnt from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, not to mention the Snowden revelation of the most extensive government mass surveillance operations the world has ever seen. Pattern of life analysis has been literally adopted in the algorithms of the “kill chain” of drone bombers
