Algorithms and conceptual history

Abstract

This essay explores the theoretical
questions emerging from the proliferation of
digitally mediated forms of social intercourse
and their impact on the modern constellation
of political and social concepts. While several
disciplines have long since begun to address
the impact of digital technology on their objects
of study, an inquiry into how the semantics of
politics and society mutates within contexts
regulated by algorithms is still all but absent
from the landscape of the history of concepts.
The essay aims at laying out a cartography
of the theoretical problems that derive from
them and that need to be faced and discussed
when addressing the technological margins of
conceptual history. First it does that by looking
for tools and answers in the work of the founders
of Begriffsgeschichte, focusing in particular on
how the topic of technology has been treated
in laying the grounds of conceptual history.
Second, it discusses some contributions that
have tried to answer to the conundrums exposed
above, laying the first fragments of a conceptual
history of ‘algorithmic politics’ in its link with the
current transformations of State.