Engines of Order

Book excerpt: Software has become a key component of contemporary life and algorithmic techniques that rank, classify, or recommend anything that fits into digital form are everywhere. This book approaches the field of information ordering conceptually as well as historically. Building on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon and the cultural techniques tradition, it first examines the constructive and cumulative character of software and shows how software-making constantly draws on large reservoirs of existing knowledge and techniques. It then reconstructs the historical trajectories of a series of algorithmic techniques that have indeed become the building blocks for contemporary practices of ordering. Developed in opposition to centuries of library tradition, coordinate indexing, text processing, machine learning, and network algorithms instantiate dynamic, perspectivist, and interested forms of arranging information, ideas, or people. Embedded in technical infrastructures and economic logics, these techniques have become engines of order that transform the spaces they act upon.