This is a question really. I have written some fiction on the theme of algorithmic governance (algorithmic governmentality, algocracy). These stories try to explore the friction you experience living in automated processes that have a particular model of who and what you are, and create affordances and nudges based on that model. I'm sure there are lots of works like this out there (and / or exploring algorithmic governance in other ways) and I'd like to make a list. Suggestions welcome, and I'll try to remember to expand this when I come across more.
For example:
- The novel If/Then by Matthew De Abaiuta (and here's a paper I co-wrote about that)
- Cory Doctorow's 'Petard'
- Robert Kiely and Sean O'Brien's essay 'Science Friction' has some useful context and maybe some leads
- Sarah Gailey's 'Stet,' about self-driving cars
- Surian Soosay's 'Portrait of an Amazonian,' maybe?
- Kate Crawford, 'Can an Algorithm be Agnostic?': an article deploying vignettes
- Ferrett Steinmetz's article '8 Science Fiction Books That Get Programming Right' doesn't focus on algorithmic governance per se but is adjacent and interesting
- Catherine Lacy, 'Congratulations on your Loss' ... see below!
- Daniel Suarez' Daemon and Freedom (tm)
- 'Life's a Game' by Charles Stross (gamification theme) in Twelve Tomorrows
- Tochi Onyebuchi, 'How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary' (explores algorithmic reparations ... mentioned briefly in a thing I wrote for Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities)
- Tim Maughan's Infinite Detail (surveillance theme, ghosts)
- Naomi Kritzer, 'Better Living through Algorithms' (kind of interesting heterotopian take on algorithmic governmentality)
- Yoon Ha Lee's 'The Erasure Game,' sort of (gamified health and wellbeing dystopia)
- Yoon Ha Lee's 'Welcome To Triumph Band,' sort of (see below)
- An older work, but maybe Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (automation, psychometrics)
- Another older work, but maybe Frederik Pohl's 'The Midas Plague' (automation, dystopian post-scarcity)
- Joanna Kavena, Zed (haven't read, but was recommended in this area)
- Marc-Uwe King, Qualityland (ditto)
- Nick Harkaway, Gnomon (ditto)
My stories are e.g.:
There is also another SFF trope that is adjacent to this, which you might call AI takeover, which is much more to do with automated processes behaving in unexpectedly anthropological ways. There are obviously overlaps, but I think mostly I'm interested in something else here. As Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness puts it (I'm paraphrasing), the risk is not that AI won't do what we ask, but that it will do exactly what we ask. I think what I'm looking for is Algorithmic Governance Weirdness, a subset of AI weirdness.
For theory, here's a wonderful reading list resource: Critical Algorithm Studies.
There's an obvious affinity between Algorithmic Governance Weirdness fiction and the technothriller, or postcyberpunk in a gritty five-minutes-into-the-future vein (see 'Science Friction'). But various contemporary techno-dystopias, such as Tlotlo Tsamaase’s ‘Virtual Snapshots’ (2016), Yoon Ha-Lee’s ‘Welcome to Triumph Band’ (2018) and ‘The Erasure Game’ (2019), and Catherine Lacey’s ‘Congratulations on Your Loss’ (2021), even if they venture into slightly more flamboyant and satirical worldbuilding, nevertheless still offering grimly comic images of life as a fungible human — intimately surveilled, measured, and groomed within regimes of absurd and unaccountable gamified power. In Lee’s ‘Welcome to Triumph Band,’ for example, the reader is inducted as a marching band cadet and informed, “You will be periodically tested at the firing range and expected to maintain acceptable aggregate scores. Be warned that, due to the variation in threat levels from terrorists and domestic threats, what constitutes an acceptable score may be revised periodically” (Lee, 2018).
Across many such works, automation is presented as disempowering people more than freeing people from toil. Loosely speaking, the delicate dance of data and human behavior also expresses the struggles of capital and labor, and so expresses proclivities of enclosure and extraction. Automation doesn’t only ‘steal jobs’ but also transforms relations of production in ways that might be described as “fauxtomation” (Taylor 2018) or “heteromation” (Ekbia and Nardi 2017). You can be made to work in new ways. You can be made to want or need new things, or be made to buy things you traditionally got for free. “Hadn’t I been in line yesterday to escape the rise in sunlight prices, effective today?” laments the protagonist of Tsamaase’s ‘Virtual Snapshots.’ Sometimes these new enclosures and extractions are narrated, as in ‘Welcome to Triumph Band,’ in a fascist bark; at other times, in the chirpy or soothing style of a wellness guru.
In a lot of these works, a residual classic dystopian imaginary is discernible. Catherine Lacey’s ‘Congratulations on Your Loss’ (2021) is an elegantly dreamlike account of the psychic damage of living in a regime of unaccountable algorithmic disciplinarity. Yet Lacey’s story doesn't really seem willing to seek beyond rote Orwellian rituals for the source and significance of the techno-social conditions it portrays. When the data dystopia speaks — a kind of Big Mother, sternly simpering that “we must understand that the integrity of society in general is of a greater importance than of society in specific, that is, people are more important than a person” (Lacey 2021) — what gets erased is the concrete history underpinning the rise of the contemporary surveillant smart city, as well as contemporary communities of resistance. Does the arrival of this dystopia really owe nothing to the gig economy’s promise of flexible work tailored to the needs of “a person,” you; to e-commerce and targeted ads tailored to your interests; to the imperative to develop your personal brand and monetize your lifestyle; to the algorithmic processing of populations for gentrification and incarceration via credit scoring, via recidivism analysis, and via police predictive analytics; to Google Search and Google Maps? To the obnoxiously individualistic ideology of hustle culture, and its claims that 'a person,' you, is always more important than 'people'? I think this becomes a story that makes not only its characters, but also its readers, question their perceptions, memory, and judgments.
