Algorithmic Logic in Digital Capitalism

This chapter details the key characteristics of algorithmic systems in their current hegemonic social form, which helps to shed a light on the reasons for their increasing social influence. These characteristics include: opacity/obfuscation, datafication, automation, and instrumental rationalisation. Because technologies are inevitably embedded in – and influenced by – the social context in which they develop, the author’s analysis considers these systems as a part of competitive and inherently unstable capitalist society, or to put it more narrowly, as a part of digital capitalism. This provides a critical analytic framework that points to the fact there is nothing ‘natural’ in these characteristics of algorithmic systems, while making it possible to delineate both the structural reasons for their development and their social consequences. On this basis it is claimed we can denote a specific algorithmic logic in digital capitalism that continuously reinforces itself.