Political philosophy Archives
August 18, 2019
Government by algorithm
Matthew B. Crawford’s lengthy essay in the latest number of American Affairs, “Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy,” imposes heavy demands on the reader — it may require several cups of coffee, and it will certainly require setting aside your phone — but the slog is worth it.
The writer, a motorcycle mechanic who moonlights as a philosopher (or maybe it’s the other way around), unfolds a profound theory to explain, and to a certain degree defend, the populist revolts that have roiled politics around the world in recent years. He draws on many sources, but the most salient are interrelated developments in the technology sector and government. The argument, though very complex, might be summarized thusly: the technocratic effort to replace government by natural persuasion and consent, with government by rationalistic algorithm and nudge, has introduced a crisis of legitimacy, the resolution of which we cannot yet foresee.
Government by persuasion and consent, you see, results in an ineradicable untidiness. Persuasion may be conditional, consent may be refused; ornery men will stoneface the most perfect logical syllogism; the indecisive may withdraw consent at the most perfectly inopportune moment. The whole thing presents to the rationalistic mind an excruciating muddle. One does not often find deliberative assemblies — school boards, city councils, parliaments — filled up with trained engineers. One finds them filled up with lawyers; engineers often regard them as akin to torture.
The engineering mind, meanwhile, produced the algorithm. Therefore, government by algorithm is mechanistic, indeed automated. Its edicts emerge from behind an impenetrable veil of high-end mathematics backed by supreme computing power. As Crawford puts it, with sly understatement: “One reason why algorithms have become attractive to elites is that they can be used to install the automated enforcement of cutting‑edge social norms.”