In this response to commentaries on 'The Dark Side of Values in Algorithmic Systems' we explore how the commentaries extend our schema in time and in space, enriching our admittedly light theorising. We address the question of where to locate values, where is the best place to intervene and what 'methodological infrastructures' would allow social scientists an active role in discussions. We discuss how difficult it is nail down understandings of values across academic disciplines and colloquial usages. Yet we insist that it is worth trying to walk this tightrope because values might be a way of opening up discussions about social wholes and power which otherwise remain obscured in debates about new technology.
Knowledge is best negotiated and produced through collective dialogue. Reading the thoughtful responses to our work, the importance of diverse perspectives emerged as an opportunity to reflect and build. Philosopher Ludwik Fleck defined a thought collective as “a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction,” whose members adopt shared ways of perceiving and thinking while continually transforming them ( Fleck, 1979 , Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 39 ). The Zapotec concept of comunalidad likewise treats knowledge production as a collective endeavor that exchanges, reciprocates, and remains diverse and interdependent ( Martínez Luna, 2010 , Eso que llaman comunalidad , 17). The five commentaries gathered here exemplify this: each brings our theoretical and methodological proposals on creators’ belief systems into dialogue with a different disciplinary vocabulary, foregrounding questions and tensions that might not have emerged otherwise. The authors span a range of geographies, (sub)disciplines, and trajectories, enriching the conversation through their diversity. What follows reflects the thought style of this comunalidad , discussing its main proposals.
This piece engages Arvidsson and Bonini's discussion of workhouses and platforms as a way of approaching questions of transition from capitalism. It defends the idea of neofeudalism, developing it in light of AI.
This commentary takes up a question the article raises but does not settle: in what realm do public values belong? I attend to the distinction between first, society's values held by society as a whole and second, social values operated within specific and culturally embedded communities. I suggest that the ethnographic evidence presented in the article is oriented to the latter. Drawing on the processual theory of value that the authors invoke, I argue that public values are not held somewhere in complete and coherent form, and thus cannot be harmed or impaired by systems. Rather, they are made in the act of being invoked, and following this, the five disconnects can be understood as sites of value creation, rather than as sites of value depletion. To support this argument, I focus on the case of the negotiation of thresholds at the automated border.
