ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the risky medium of the algorithm, a technology developed for managing aesthetic and political risk. The algorithm dispositif regards a dynamic psycho-perceptual milieu participant in the disposition of worlds that at once limits and enables the movement of bodies in space and time. I argue that, more than anything, the algorithm dispositif betrays a theory of action whose origins lie in Aristotelian aesthetics and metaphysics. The form of power identified herein as #datapolitik extends and modulates those origins in important and considerable ways by introducing a negative feedback ontology that produces an intuition heretofore unavailable but made operational by the algorithm dispositif: information behaves. Assessing the implications of this insight, the chapter concludes with the following provocations: 1. We have yet to develop the critical tools to acknowledge and engage the power dynamics of #datapolitik; 2. Surveillance is not only the wrong metaphor, but the wrong way to think about the power dynamics of #datapolitik; and 3. #datapolitik is a police power.
