Life by Algorithms
How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Robohumans
Categories
Chapter 1. Automated Expulsion in the U.S. Foreclosure Epidemic
Chapter 2. Roboeducation
Chapter 3. Detention and Deportation of Minors in U.S. Immigration Custody
Chapter 4. A Felony Conviction as a Roboprocess
Emotions
Chapter 5. Infinite Proliferation, or The Making of the Modern Runt
Chapter 6. Emotional Roboprocesses
Surveillance
Chapter 7. Ubiquitous Surveillance
Chapter 8. Controlling Numbers: How Quantification Shapes the World
Hugh Gusterson
Categories
Chapter 1. Automated Expulsion in the U.S. Foreclosure Epidemic
Noelle Stout
Chapter 2. Roboeducation
Ann Lutz Fernandez and Catherine Lutz
Chapter 3. Detention and Deportation of Minors in U.S. Immigration Custody
Susan J. Terrio
Chapter 4. A Felony Conviction as a Roboprocess
Keesha M. Middlemass
Emotions
Chapter 5. Infinite Proliferation, or The Making of the Modern Runt
Alex Blanchette
Chapter 6. Emotional Roboprocesses
Robert W. Gehl
Surveillance
Chapter 7. Ubiquitous Surveillance
Joseph Masco
Chapter 8. Controlling Numbers: How Quantification Shapes the World
Sally Engle Merry
Afterword: Remaking the World
Catherine Besteman
Acknowledgments
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Review Quotes
Choice
"Providing an excellent survey of the algorithmically managed life, each chapter of this edited volume shines light upon a particular aspect of certain more or less familiar roboprocesses to show how algorithms are remaking the world. Highly recommended."
Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“‘The Machine Stops,’ E. M. Forster’s 1909 science fiction story, tells the tale of a human society collapsing when the technology upon which it has become dependent fails. Think of Gusterson and Besteman’s volume as ‘The Machine Starts,’ a collection of unsettling ethnographic accounts of the rise of algorithmic governance, of a world in which machines automate structures of social inequality in the service of distracted corporate profit, overreaching militarism, and a globally attenuating commitment to democracy. A necessary and sobering call to arms.”
John Cheney-Lippold, University of Michigan
“Compelling and original, this book examines several key issues that have previously failed to receive the serious intellectual rigor that they deserve. By focusing on many diverse domains of algorithmic implementation—from education to prisons, from the border to factory farming—Life by Algorithms gives readers an excellent and accessible overview of how the ‘algorithmic turn’ challenges many of our current understandings of the world.”
Marshall Sahlins, emeritus, University of Chicago
“A fine array of instructive studies that amount to a beneficent algorithm for understanding our times.”
Nick Seaver, Tufts University
“What can anthropology offer to contemporary debates about algorithms? Tackling the term in its broadest sense, this wide-ranging collection provides one answer: from finance to farming, from classrooms to courthouses, algorithms dehumanize, damage, and deskill the practices of everyday life. Life by Algorithms documents the calculative violence of bureaucratic rationality in its most recent computational form. For anthropological scholars of algorithmic systems, this book is sure to become an obligatory reference.”
Eitan Y. Wilf, author of Creativity on Demand
“Life by Algorithms brings together a number of excellent scholars who study the growing impact of computerized algorithms on our lives. For anyone interested in computerized algorithms, this volume is a welcome and timely contribution to an important emerging field.”
For more information, or to order this book, please visit https://www.press.uchicago.edu
Google preview here
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
