The secret life of algorithms: speculation on queered futures of neurodiverse analgorithmic feeling and consciousness

Algorithmic modes of thought have long and problematic histories of collusion in processes of governmentality, dating at least back to the Atlantic slave trade and including the othering of neurodiverse, black and indigenous, and queer cultures. But beyond their instrumentation within systems of power, this paper proposes that at the foundation level of algorithmic design there are a series of assumptions about what constitutes legitimate thought processes. These assumptions are based on neurotypical modes of thought and often ignore the possibilities of more neurodiverse thinking, which is regularly devalued in our society. This naturalised “whiteness” that lies at the centre of and colonises algorithmic programming needs to be interrogated and rethought, it is argued, in order to break the relationships between algorithms and oppressive power systems. Drawing on fugitive and devalued modes of thought such as queer kinship and failure, black sociality and the incomputability at the heart of the mathematical concept of Omega, the article speculates on the conception of a minor algorithmic value or “life” closer to that of an emergent collective and ecological consciousness than that of the dominant individualised and fixed model that is valued within contemporary capitalism.