Self and others in algorithmic governmentality: between hyper-individuation and disindividuation

Abstract This essay examines how the rapidly expanding algorithmic, data-driven mode of understanding humans affects modes of subjectivity. Through a critical, theoretical framework, the paper explores the hyper-individuation that results from the personalization of information, services, and environments, and from the fact that algorithmic decisions, predictions, and recommendations are individually tailored, creating a world adapted only to us. In this societal model—this is the paper’s main focus—others will be erased from our phenomenal world. First, I briefly examine how the supposed hyper-individuation is deceptive and hollow, and leads, paradoxically, to disindividuation: The algorithmic mediation of our world does not perceive or address the subject as such and induces instead an irreducible dispersion and abstraction of the person. I then explore the disappearance of others in this hyper-individuated, algorithmically mediated existence and argue that such friction-free existence does not allow us to become human subjects in the full sense. The hyper-individuation is also deceptive in that while recommendations and predictions are maximally tailored to a specific subject, one is nevertheless “understood” through the data of others. The relationship of oneself to the other, therefore, undergoes acute changes. For while the presence of others persists under algorithmic mediation, it is reshuffled, averaged, decomposed, and then recomposed to become unidentifiable and unrecognizable. This new algorithmically processed alterity does not give our selfhood full space to develop.