An excerpt from You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem on the internet’s social contract by Jose Marichal: “In our increasingly digital world, algorithmic models take every typed word or gesture (likes), eye movement, or swipe and breaks them down into either a node (thing) or an edge (attribute), which is placed into a database. This age of incessant collecting and analysing of our digital life is what I call an algorithmic age. In the algorithmic age, the priority is to create products that can predict our future behaviour. Prior to the 2010s, prediction was important, but understanding ourselves and other humans was the priority. We have moved into a regime where data is collected not simply to understand humans for marketing or surveillance purposes, but to create artificial replicas of human thought.
Research and lived experiences increasingly show that most people are not ‘swimming against the data tide’. They are content to accept a world of algorithmic classification despite its obvious harms because it gives them a (false) promise of comfort and security. We continue to be glued to our devices, increasingly using social media platforms as the foundation of our information diets. A 2024 Pew study found that 86 percent of users got their news from digital devices, and a growing number (54 percent) sometimes or often get their news from social media platforms. On social media sites popular with young people, 40 percent of Instagram users and 52 percent of TikTok users regularly get their news from each platform (St Aubin and Liedke 2024a). If we are under the throes of algorithmic overlords, we are not acting like it.
For this reason, we should think of our relationship to algorithms through the lens of contract theory. The concept of a social contract is a core element of political theory. Political theorists have used it to justify why individuals should form allegiances to a particular political system. It is a thought experiment designed to illustrate a relationship, one that cannot possibly be universal in practice since individuals have different reasons for their allegiance to a state. Nonetheless, it is one that provides legitimacy for state power. The three most prominent applications of contract theory come from Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes, who posit that rational actors will willingly give up their theoretical position in a ‘state of nature’ either for protection of the self (Hobbes 1967 [1651]) or for an increased preservation of rights (Locke 1996). In Rousseau’s (1920 [1762]) case, leaving the state of nature is a fact and the only way to restore a sense of meaning and an escape from the judgement and status consciousness of modernity is to submit to your political community – the general will. In each case, the social contract justifies adherence to a political system. The system will either protect your physical person (Hobbes 1967 [1651]), preserve your natural rights (Locke 1996 [1689]), or provide you with meaning (Rousseau 1920 [1762])…(More)”
