This book explores the complex ways in which algorithms and big data are reshaping everyday culture, while at the same time perpetuating inequality and intersectional discrimination. It situates issues of humanity, identity, and culture in relation to free will, surveillance, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, solipsism, and creativity.

Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Everyday Life explores the complex ways in which algorithms and big data, or algorithmic culture, are simultaneously reshaping everyday culture while perpetuating inequality and intersectional discrimination. Contributors situate issues of humanity, identity, and culture in relation to free will, surveillance, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, solipsism, and creativity, offering a critique of the myriad constraints enacted by algorithms. This book argues that consumers are undergoing an ontological overhaul due to the enhanced manipulability and increasingly mandatory nature of algorithms in the market, while also positing that algorithms may help navigate through chaos that is intrinsically present in the market democracy. Ultimately, Algorithmic Culture calls attention to the present-day cultural landscape as a whole as it has been reconfigured and re-presented by algorithms.

Introduction: In the Presence of Algorithms

Stefka Hristova, Soonkwan Hong, and Jennifer Daryl Slack

Chapter 1: Why Do We Need the Concept of Algorithmic Culture?

Jennifer Daryl Slack and Stefka Hristova

Chapter 2: Fetishizing Algorithms and Rearticulating Consumption

Soonkwan Hong

Chapter 3: Monoculturalism, Aculturalism, and Post-Culturalism: The Exclusionary Culture of

Algorithmic Development

Ushnish Sengupta

Chapter 4: “The Spectre of Self-Organization”: Will Algorithms Guide Us towards Truth?

Ravi Sekhar Chakraborty

Chapter 5: Machines of Liberation, Machines of Control: The Ambiguous Roots of Data Capitalism

Reka Patricia Gal

Chapter 6: The Autoimmunitary Violence of the Algorithms of Mourning

Stefka Hristova

Chapter 7: Algorithms, Identity, and Cultural Consequences of Genetic Profiles

Amanda K. Girard

Chapter 8: Technologies of Convenience: An Examination of the Algorithmic Bias in the Input/Output System of Digital Cameras

Joel S. Beatty

Chapter 9: Generative Adversarial Networks: Contemporary Art and/as Algorithm

James MacDevitt

About the Contributors