Andrew Whelan

Algorithms are now present across a whole range of commercial and state activities: determining credit scores and social security entitlements, providing healthcare diagnostics and treatment plans, setting prices and gig-work rates of pay, screening job applicants, predicting crime and more. How did we get here? This project traces the history of the algorithm at work, plotting its emergence relative to the humble flowchart. Documenting case studies of flowcharts prior to and during the emergence of algorithmic automation at key moments in the twentieth century, the research makes a case for understanding algorithms not as interloper technologies, but as implementations of internally coherent organizational demands for efficiency and precision. In automating and thereby apparently resolving local problems, algorithms paradoxically institute and sediment new challenges. This research aims to facilitate a better historical grounding to the kinds of concerns people express about algorithms: by documenting the kinds of organizational contexts they emerged from, and by showing how current critical commentary about algorithms echoes a long tradition of criticism around the administrative delegation to media technologies.