Value-based frameworks are widely used to guide the design of algorithms, yet their influence in mediating users’ perception and use of algorithm-driven technologies is vastly understudied. Moreover, there is a need to move research beyond a focus on human-algorithm interaction to account for how the values these frameworks promote – algorithmic values – become socialised outside the boundaries of the (human-algorithm) interaction and how they influence everyday practices that are not algorithmically mediated. This paper traces the entanglement of algorithmic values and everyday life by mapping how residents of the Salvadorian town of El Zonte perceive the top-down transition of the town into "Bitcoin Beach" through value-driven transformations to diverse aspects of their material culture and built environment. This approach advances empirical research on the impact of algorithms by acknowledging the myriad ways in which those who won’t or can’t (afford to) interact with algorithm-driven technologies are impacted by the value-based outcomes of their programming and provides novel insights for critically examining the role of algorithm-driven technologies in shaping sustainable futures.

As the algorithmic retrofitting of everyday interactions steadily advances, so does the need to understand how humans and algorithms influence each other over time. For this purpose, the interaction has become the primary site of empirical research. Yet, the relational, spatial and temporal boundaries that the interaction brings to bear are poorly defined, largely outdated and often restrictive. This results in novel findings aggregating to already worn-out narratives where the interaction is the only way algorithms participate and transform everyday life. In contrast, the concept of relationship, which entails relational, emotional, temporal, and spatial dynamics more attuned to how humans and algorithms increasingly influence each other, has received little attention. Borrowing Robert Hinde's framework of "patterned interactions=relationship," this provocation challenges the limits of the interaction and argues that the relational boundaries of a relationship open up new opportunities for empirically researching how humans and algorithms influence each other over time.

This paper examines how the social meaning, agency and potentials of algorithms in everyday life are challenging the technical notions of algorithms that are embedded in their design. Although tensions between social and technical aspects of algorithms have been explored in critical algorithm studies, there remains a research gap regarding the integration of algorithms into social discourse, material culture, local practices, and imaginaries. Building on the concept of social life the paper traces how notions of algorithms are negotiated, imagined and re-interpreted within the context of social interactions as the Bitcoin Beach project is integrated into everyday life of people in the Salvadorian town of El Zonte. The findings presented in this paper contribute to extending ethnographies of algorithms beyond human-algorithm interactions by exploring the various contexts in which algorithms are constructed and scrutinising what is at stake when notions of algorithms become social by design.

This paper blends work in extended mind, distributed cognition, and predictive processing to provide a novel generative theory of interaction. This dovetailing offers an emerging picture of cognition that HCI stands to benefit from: our cognition is extended, distributed, and constantly trying to predict incoming sensory stimuli across social, cultural, and temporal scales. We develop a sketch of a generative theory of interaction for HCI and offer some directions for future work.

In reality, very few adhere to either position strictly. Instead, theorists fall along a spectrum, approaching one position or the other to different degrees. Those falling closest to the sociobiological position include E.O. Wilson (in both his classic work Sociobiology [79] and his more recent Genesis [80]) as well as those thinkers associated with “high church evolutionary psychology” ([4], [51]). Theorists falling closest to the center constitute the so-called “California School,” which tends to emphasize a bidirectional process of gene-culture coevolution and

1Parsons School of Design, The New School 2Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University 3School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington 4School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University 5School of Design Strategies, Parsons School of Design 6Department of Communication, University of California, Davis 7National War College, National Defense University