Research How to Cite: Brower, Virgil W. "Genealogy of Algorithms: Datafication as Transvaluation." Le foucaldien 6, no. 1 (2020): 11, 1–43. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16995/lefou.74 Published: 19 October 2020

Peer Review: This article has been peer-reviewed through the double-blind process of Le foucaldien, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative­ ­Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, ­distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: Le foucaldien is a peer-reviewed open-access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. Brower, Virgil W. "Genealogy of Algorithms: Datafication as Transvaluation." Le foucaldien 6, no. 1 (2020): 11, 1–43. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.74

RESEARCH Genealogy of Algorithms: Datafication as Transvaluation Virgil W. Brower Charles University in Prague, CZ [email protected]

This article investigates religious ideals persistent in the datafication of information society. Its nodal point is Thomas Bayes, after whom Laplace names the primal probability algorithm. It reconsiders their mathematical innovations with Laplace's providential deism and Bayes' singular theological treatise. Conceptions of divine justice one finds among probability theorists play no small part in the algorithmic data-mining and microtargeting of Cambridge Analytica. Theological traces within mathematical computation are emphasized as the vantage over large numbers shifts to weights beyond enumeration in probability theory. Collateral secularizations of predestination and theodicy emerge as probability optimizes into Bayesian prediction and machine learning. The paper revisits the semiotics and theism of Peirce and a given beyond the probable in Whitehead to recontextualize the critiques of providence by Agamben and Foucault. It reconsiders datafication problems alongside Nietzschean valuations. Religiosity likely remains encoded within the very algorithms presumed purified by technoscientific secularity or mathematical dispassion.

Keywords: ; machine learning; probability; justice; government; microtargeting 2 Brower: Genealogy of Algorithms

Subject and object have switched places. The sites, the apps, the ubiquitous platforms: Computers run the show now and we—mere data subjects […] work and worship them […] our ontic exhaust powering the megacorporate machinery. Perhaps the inevitability of the reversal was always there, coded in the words.1

[T]he more religious our views are, the more probable they become.2

Although the Italian mathematician Paolo Zellini refrains from overt espousal of genealogical inquiry by name, in The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men (2020) he expresses intellectual indebtedness to Nietzsche and Foucault with regards to history and origins.3 Under their influence, Zellini posits a power- ful "admixture" of calculations and mathematics with religions and metaphysics.4 Drawing upon Vedic texts and their eventual admixture with the philosophy of mathematics that develops in ancient Greece, he claims:

From problems posed by the gods stems the basis of a way of thinking with- out which modern mathematics would be inconceivable. We can identify the reason behind this persistent link between divine and human orders, between foundational propositions of the gods and modern mathematics […]. The connection is [subtle and involves] the most technical and secret operations of calculation, the fundamental paradigms on which algebra and analysis are still based today.5

My project allies itself with these lines as guiding tenets. The current essay end