The alternative is cloud ethics, which chooses an episteme of opacity over cybernetic transparency

In this book I propose a different way of thinking about the ethicopolitics of algorithms. What I call a cloud ethics is concerned with the political formation of relations to oneself and to others that is taking place, increasingly, in and through algorithms. My use of the term cloud here is not confined to the redefined sovereignties and technologies of a “cloud computing era,” as understood by Benjamin Bratton and others, but refers to the apparatus through which cloud data and algorithms gather in new and emergent forms. The cloud in my cloud ethics is thus closer to that envisaged by John Durham Peters, for whom clouds are media in the sense that they are “containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible.” To consider algorithms as having ethics in formation is to work with the propensities and possibilities that algorithms embody, pushing the potentials of their arrangements beyond the decisive moment of the output. A cloud ethics acknowledges that algorithms contain, within their spatial arrangements, multiple potentials for cruelties, surprises, violences, joys, distillations of racism and prejudice, injustices, probabilities, discrimination, and chance. Indeed, many of the features that some would like to excise from the algorithm—bias, assumptions, weights—are routes into opening up their politics. Algorithms come to act in the world precisely in and through the relations of selves to selves, and selves to others, as these relations are manifest in the clusters and attributes of data. To learn from relations of selves and others, the algorithm must already be replete with values, thresholds, assumptions, probability weightings, and bias. In a real sense, an algorithm must necessarily discriminate to have any traction in the world. The very essence of algorithms is that they afford greater degrees of recognition and value to some features of a scene than they do to others. In so doing, algorithms generate themselves as ethicopolitical beings in the world. If to have ethics is not merely to have a code prohibiting, for example, bias or assumptions, but to work on oneself via relations, then the ethicopolitics of algorithms involves investigations of how they learn to recognize and to act, how they extract assumptions from data relations, and how they learn what ought to be from relations with other humans and algorithms. To be clear, the cloud ethics I propose here does not belong to an episteme of accountability, transparency, and legibility, but on the contrary begins with the opacity, partiality, and illegibility of all forms of giving an account, human and algorithmic. To advance a cloud ethics is to engage the ungrounded politics of all forms of ethical relations. The significant new ethical challenges that algorithms seem to present to society actually manifest novel features of some profoundly old problems of the grounds for ethical action. As Judith Butler explains in her Spinoza lectures, the demand to give an account of oneself will always fall short, for “I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the conditions under which I emerge.” If one assumes that the determination of an unequivocal I who acts is a necessary precondition of ethics, as Butler cautions, then this identifiable self is “dispossessed” by the condition of its emergence in relation to others. For Butler, this persistent failure to give a clear-sighted account does not mark the limit point of ethics. On the contrary, the opaque and unknowable nature of making all kinds of acting subjects is the condition of possibility of having an ethicopolitical life. In short, and in contrast to the equation of ethics with transparency and disclosure, ethical responsibility is sustained by conditions of partiality and opacity. My notion of a cloud ethics extends the opacity of the human subject, envisaging a plurality of venues for ethical responsibility in which all selves—human and algorithmic—proceed from their illegibility. The apparent opacity and illegibility of the algorithm should not pose an entirely new problem for human ethics, for the difficulty of locating clear-sighted action was already present. The I who forms the ethical relation was always in question and is now, with algorithms, in question in new ways. Though the mathematical propositions of algorithms cannot be made fully legible, or rendered accountable, they can be called to give accounts of the conditions of their emergence. These conditions include some relations that are identifiably between humans and algorithms—such as the selection and labeling of training data, the setting of target outputs, or the editing of code “in the wild,” for example—but others still are relations of algorithms to another algorithm, such as a classifier supplying the training data from which a neural network will learn. In all such instances of iterative learning, the significant point is that the conditions of an algorithm’s emergence—a composite of human-algorithm relations—are venues for ethicopolitics. In a discussion on the impossibility of the transparent algorithm, the brilliant and generous scholar of black studies and machine learning Ramon Amaro once said, “Well what would it be if we even could open it? It’s just math.” Of course, he intended the comment as a provocation, but mathematics is never only “just math,” as Amaro’s work vividly shows. To reflect on the conditions of an algorithm’s emergence is also to consider how, as mathematical knowledge forms, algorithms have achieved the status of objective certainty and definiteness in an uncertain world. Ludwig Wittgenstein observed mathematical propositions to be “given the stamp of incontestability,” a mark of the “incontrovertible” and an “exemption from doubt” that other propositions, such as “I am called,” are not afforded. For Wittgenstein, mathematics as practice—like all other language games—is concerned with particular uses of propositions, where “what a proposition is, is in one sense determined by the rules of sentence formation, and in another sense by the use of the sign in the language game.” His concern is that the mathematical proposition has achieved a particular status of certainty in an otherwise uncertain world, so that it becomes “a hinge on which your dispute can turn.” For Wittgenstein, the mathematical proposition should be regarded as no less doubtful or uncertain than the “empirical propositions” otherwise made about the world. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s point is to address mathematical propositions as empirical actions that are “in no way different from the actions of the rest of our lives, and are in the same degree liable to forgetfulness, oversight and illusion.” Following Wittgenstein, the use of mathematical propositions is profoundly social and, in my reading, ethicopolitical. An algorithm is formulated through a series of truth claims about its match to the world, and yet, in its use in the world it is as prone to forgetfulness, oversight, misrecognition, and illusion as any other language game. Algorithms such as those used to detect latent social unrest in the city may appear in the world as Wittgenstein’s “hinge on which your protest can turn” in the most direct sense that the hinge delimits and circumscribes the arc of the politics of protest. But the algorithm as hinge does not merely mark the limit point of resistance; rather, it presents something as a singular optimal output, when it is actually generated through multiple and contingent relations. My cloud ethics considers the algorithmic hinge to be akin to Karen Barad’s scientific apparatus, which decides what matters in the world, what or who can be recognized, what can be protested, and which claims can be brought. Understood in this way, the algorithm is not the hinge as an incontrovertible axis, exempted from doubt, on which all social, political, and economic life turns. “The hinge point,” as Foucault differently identifies, can also be the point of “ethical concerns and political struggle,” as well as the point of “critical thought against abusive techniques of government.”