Intentionalities of the Algorithm: Historical Practices and Socio-Computing Infrastructures. A Philosophical Account

Computing does not only imply a logical interaction with and through machines, but also – maybe more poignantly – a way of thinking. As historians of technology acknowledge, computing meant in the past so much as counting, or even reasoning. But in this sense, the history of computing has a much earlier beginning than what is popularly thought. The first machines that we can recognize as abstract computers were imagined by Charles Babbage in the 19^th Century, but the first algorithms were assembled centuries before, to be performed by social machineries. Drawing on an expanded understanding of Tomasello’s hypothesis on the nature of collective thinking, this article argues that collective intentionalities – which can be thought of as pre-conceptual or non-conscious states of collective organization – are inherent settings embedded in social algorithms, and that they play an important role in the socio-computing infrastructure in which these algorithms perform. The article then investigates this path by exploring historical samples of social algorithms and collective intentionalities, from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to contemporary socio-algorithmic practices. It then attempts to reconstruct the functional patterns and the complex relations they afford, while it looks at some of the cognitive articulations they conform. In the end, the article explains an algorithm as a collective social technology that emerges as a cultural script, where we find recurring process of signifying, inscribing and interpreting, and in which a given form of social thinking, involving a characteristic worldview, is always mobilized.