Authority of Algorithms: Resistance Futile?

If we as parents want to act sensibly and responsibly, we tend to make our children’s access to digital media as restrictive as possible. After all, in the digital world it is the algorithms that have the say and not us parents. Now is the opportunity to broaden our horizons and learn, in a very readable book, how workers, influencers, and activists are developing tactics of algorithmic resistance by appropriating and transforming the same algorithms that control our lives. The book is called “Algorithms of Resistance. The Everyday Fight against Platform Power” and is freely available as an open access publication via MIT Press. The starting point: Algorithms are everywhere around us and are penetrating more and more aspects of our daily lives. While accounts of the power of platforms tend to seem bleak and monolithic, Algorithms of Resistance shows how people can fight back against algorithms in a variety of areas. Authors Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré draw on rich ethnographic material and perspectives from the global North and South to examine how people appropriate and transform algorithms to pursue their goals in three areas of daily life: Gig work , cultural industry and politics. They show how forms of algorithmic action and resistance are endemic and commonplace and how platform society is a contested battlefield of opposing forces.