Edesio Fernández reviews Algorithmic Institutionalism: The Changing Rules of Social and Political Life (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Ricardo F. Mendonça, Fernando Filgueiras, and Virgilio Almeida.
One of the most important features of modern life is the growing gap between the nature of social, political and environmental processes and the political, legal and institutional processes that aim to regulate them by determining the rules of the social contract, especially in supranational matters, with ever-increasing impacts on global society. This contradiction is undeniable and deeply problematic.
On the one hand, laws, public policies, and institutional measures (directly or indirectly create or incite The way in which it has been treated (as far as the country is concerned) has already led to growing social distrust, especially in the legal and political institutions of democratic states. Separatist movements, the collapse of economic blocs, social, urban and rural conflicts, pressures to adopt various privatization strategies, etc., these are leading to a deep and widespread crisis of political governance and the promotion of populist imperatives and even authoritarianism. It is a manifestation of the threat of a breakdown in the social contract that makes the cry for the system possible. At various national, regional and local levels, there is a growing popular sentiment that traditional institutions are dominated and served by the most powerful political groups, as well as economic, financial and land-owning elites.
On the other hand, despite political pressures in different contexts for political and administrative decentralization, as well as calls for localism, there is no doubt that the most important processes that have had a direct and powerful impact on contemporary society are taking place at the global level. These include everything from economic and financial globalization, including the widespread circulation of capital, goods and labor (albeit in that case mainly through controversial migration processes), to political and territorial conflicts, disasters, health crises and climate change. The fact is that there is no global institution capable of effectively regulating these processes and intervening with authority. Thus, they remain at the mercy of individual and fragmented decisions by national governments, many of which are in crisis and cannot be resolved by governments alone in the private sector. There is widespread distrust in the effectiveness, and even legitimacy, of global institutions that are often linked to the interests of certain countries and to more powerful economic interests.
In this context, the strengthening of capitalism (especially finance and speculative capitalism), the absurd concentration of wealth and the resulting deepening of social inequalities have raised doubts about the ability of traditional democratic institutions, even if updated and expanded, to address pressing social and collective needs in a world threatened by the alarming effects of climate change. Democracy as a system of social organization and distribution of political power is being called into question, especially with regard to its ability to generate a more just and sustainable order that expresses values and meets the needs of the community rather than individual or collective interests.
This total order is a reality that has taken shape gradually, especially throughout the last century. Now, the remarkable advances in technology over the past few decades have opened up a new gap between “physical life” and “digital life”. Relatively recent products and services, from personal computers to the Internet to mobile phone communications, have already profoundly transformed the way people live, work, produce, consume, communicate, build relationships, and access a range of public and private services. The recent COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns have intensified and seemingly made irreversible many changes that had been occurring before. In many ways, technology has brought about even deeper changes in the social order than traditional public policies, creating diverse obligations, determining responsibilities, and distributing possibilities. All this is done through unclear processes that are hardly participatory and do not allow for any public or democratic accountability whatsoever.
The fragile democratic order is further threatened as state institutions are taken over by the private sector and the power of a few technology companies grows. Many technological advances have serious implications for individual freedoms and guarantees, especially privacy, a central concept in democracy. Not only through the actions of governments and big technology companies, but also through an array of commercially available products such as security cameras, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and other intrusive surveillance systems that are routinely used against journalists and dissidents. There is a growing sense that governments, and especially technology companies, in their quest for hegemony, have trampled on the democratic realm of individual freedoms and guarantees, with the result that decision-making processes are becoming increasingly unclear, restricted and beyond society’s understanding and reach.
The variables that shape this scenario, when combined with catalysts such as misinformation, fake news, fraud, and manipulation of the electoral process, create an explosive combination that renders any notion of transparency illusionary. In a year when record numbers of people around the world are expected to take part in elections, for many, a strong cloud of suspicion hangs over many such processes. For those who want to deny the legitimacy of democratic elections, technology is a tool to exclude society, seize power, and maintain the illusion of legitimacy in a grossly rigged social contract.
In this complex context, the increasingly used, but least understood, word of the era is undoubtedly “algorithm.” An algorithm is a sequence of executable instructions to achieve a specific purpose, and is increasingly present in applications performed in people’s daily lives, especially in the context of AI, and in the implementation of public policies and services. It directly or indirectly influences countless decisions, from the simplest to the most complex, such as delivery. Taking into account vast amounts of information and data, algorithmic systems generally provide impersonal, objective, and neutral solutions that allow resources, especially private and public financial resources, to be used more efficiently and quickly. It has been promoted as such.
However, there is already a tradition of critical research showing that, regardless of their merits, these institutions actually deepen inequalities, exacerbate polarization, pirate, reinforce prejudice, and intensify injustices, including racial and gender. How can we ensure that technological advances effectively foster social progress, promote inclusion and a more equitable distribution of resources, and do not degenerate into yet another form of exploitation and domination?
It is in this context of great challenges, serious concerns and still unanswered questions that an original and stimulating book by Professors Ricardo F. Mendonça, Fernando Filgueiras and Virgilio Almeida is published. The authors combine both political science and computer science approaches to propose a fascinating and provocative debate. Algorithms are an emerging global institution in contemporary society, since they act as a set of rules that structure the context in which humans and machines coexist and interact. They influence individual behavior, trigger collective outcomes and ultimately create a new political order based on the rationalization of computer systems. Algorithms are therefore like laws that generate rights, obligations, responsibilities and possibilities. However, in most cases they do not undergo the same decision-making process inherent in democratic institutions. Who decides and how, who participates and how, who manages and how… these central questions of the democratic process remain unsolved.
This paper provides an in-depth analysis of three cases where algorithms are widely used: public safety policy, government platform redesign and integration, and building recommendation systems in various fields. The authors also emphasize that institutions should urgently embrace algorithmic research and vice versa. The author argues that it is essential to advance the democratization of algorithms in order to limit the various risks that potentially arise in political governance in modern society.
Whether people are aware of it or not, the fact remains that algorithms create new power relations that affect and even determine the way people participate in the public sphere and social life, thus creating new problems and new forms of injustice. For the author, the challenge of democratizing algorithms requires a new critique of existing institutions and a new, ongoing process in which algorithms are explicitly integrated into the overall political dynamic and guided by democratic values such as participation, equality, pluralism, public debate, accountability and freedom.
The book develops a fascinating and necessary argument, since we all must urgently seek the best way to adapt to a world undergoing such a rapid and intense process of change, while at the same time making an effort to requalify ourselves politically and to make our decision-making processes more inclusive and sustainable. First, the biggest challenge may be to bring the “digital world” closer to the “physical world” in a concrete way, as the combination of labor precarity (due in no small part to technological advances), housing precarity and labor force precarity. The concentration of wealth is already generating alarming processes of digital exclusion. While it is true that the remarkable mobile communications revolution has enabled many of the poorest people to more easily circumvent the bottlenecks of traditional communications infrastructure, access to the digital world requires much more favorable economic conditions, as well as financial and educational capabilities. The analysis argues that democratizing the new institutions of algorithms requires the full democratization of the old state institutions, while at the same time creating at the global level new institutions that allow for participatory, pluralistic, legitimate and efficient forms of governance that allow for the promotion of significant changes in the socio-economic and environmental order of the world at risk.
This is a great book that gets us thinking and gives us a good signalling framework to navigate the difficult journey ahead.
