The Silicon Cage: Algorithmic Governance and Datafication of Social Life

This Research Topic aims to provide a critical analysis of the transition from bureaucratic governance, based on legal norms and administrative predictability, to an emerging algorithmic rationality.This process, as a global, complex and multidimensional social phenomenon, embodied in global phenomena, namely the datafication of social life (the codification of individual and collective actions into numerical representations and the centrality of digital databases), algorithmic proliferation (boosting predictive decision-making processes of a mathematical and computational nature), profoundly shapes the present and future of governance, citizenship and the human condition in our societies.This mutation should not be interpreted as a simple technical optimisation, but rather as a macrostructural reconfiguration of asymmetrical power dynamics and State sovereignty. Operating through opaque computational architectures, the new biopolitics of data shifts the management of populations to the realm of statistical prediction and risk calculation.We are witnessing a metamorphosis of the social contract: authority, previously mediated by public scrutiny, is delegated to invisible governance systems. These systems act as powerful mechanisms of social stratification, where coded biases tend to crystallise historical asymmetries, establishing new forms of exclusion that challenge traditional frameworks of political contestation.Contemporary subjectivity is entangled in processes of datafication that reduce the density of human agency to sheer patterns of consumption and behaviour. This dialectical tension between technological progress and thin surveillance necessitates that sociology interrogate the fissures in the system: the spaces where resistance, counter-conduct, and renegotiation of autonomy are still possible in the face of the hegemony of algorithmic codes.The purpose of this Research Topic is to bring together research that combines empirical rigour with theoretical depth to decipher new configurations of social control. We favour contributions that transcend technological determinism, focusing on the metamorphoses of governance systems, local and global public policies, relationships between human and non-human actors, social and cultural impacts of digital technologies, structures of solidarity, and the new morphologies of inequality produced by the automation of decision-making.Thematic areas include, but are not limited to, the following:• Governance Systems: algocracy or democracy; role of algorithms in risk assessment and management; human autonomy and citizenship; networks of interdependence between human and non-human actors; management of digital databases• Sovereignty and Infrastructure: the erosion of State power in the face of private technical infrastructure and “platform sovereignty”• Stratification and Digital Redlining: mechanisms for reproducing class, race, and gender inequalities via scoring and predictive algorithms• Biopolitics and Body Management: biometric monitoring and health datafication as tools for social normalisation; digital medicine; global health and the governance of epidemics and pandemics• The Metamorphosis of Work: algorithmic management, precariousness, and the dissolution of labour solidarity in the gig economy• Agency and Resistance: tactics of obscuration, technical sabotage, and counter-conduct in the face of ubiquitous surveillance• Crisis of Legitimacy and Opacity: the challenge of algorithmic “black boxes” to democratic deliberation and the right to explanation• Digital Epistemologies: algorithmisation and the redefinition of the concepts of truth, objectivity, and social construction of reality. Topic editors: Sandro Serpa, Carlos Miguel Ferreira Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78431/the-silicon-cage-algorithmic-governance-and-datafication-of-social-life