Algorithmic categorization erases the interactivity that defined older social categories.

Evidence

There is a deep paradox here. Although quantification is a technology of distance, today’s data relations increasingly strive to erase the distance between the social actor’s body and the precisely targeted sensor system that serves it (or more accurately, that the body serves). … But a real and important distance will remain: the distance comprised by the power of the social quantification sector against which individual actors currently have little or no agency. There is a divergence here from social categorizations as we have known them in the past. As Ian Hacking explained, the distinctive feature of social categorizations, at least until the era of Big Data, was that they were interactive—they operated as categories with which people could interact and negotiate as they were used on them. Humans can interact with today’s algorithmic categorization processes, if at all, only derivatively, through an indirect sense of what data might have already done to them. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Directly builds the Ian Hacking interaction-to-algorithm shift, relevant to the ‘data colonialism’ vs. attention/surveillance frame comparison; Hacking’s interactive kinds contrast with Zuckerberg-era design determinism. — connects to: Categorical abstraction suspends the ethical rules of personal interaction
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘interactive’ social categorization meant pre-Big Data, and what the new algorithmic equivalent lacks - useful boundary for the colonial frame.

Broader Connections

• Categorical abstraction suspends the ethical rules of personal interaction #complicates (0.78)