FCJ-185 An Algorithmic Agartha: Post-App Approaches to Synarchic Regulation

• Main Authors: Dan Mellamphy, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Humanities Press 2015-08-01
• Series: Fibreculture Journal
• Subjects: transduction; networks; mobile phones; cell phones; algorithms; governance
• Online Access: http://twentyfive.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-185-an-algorithmic-agartha-post-app-approaches-to-synarchic-regulation/

This rather suggestive and altogether speculative essay began as an attempt on our part to use a model of bio-chemical signal-transduction (Howard Rasmussen’s schema for ‘synarchic regulation’) to explain, beyond the boundaries of cell-transduction in molecular chemistry, transduction in cell-phone applications: the ‘synarchic regulation’ — and rather remarkable reticulation — of ‘cellular transmission’ in the techno-communicational rather than bio-chemical field. It was to be a complement and/or an alternate perspective to our conference-paper and subsequent book-chapter on the ‘app-alliance’ both of which had been written in and for the event of the Apps and Affect conference in October 2013. It became something slightly different, unmoored from mere cellular transmission as such and suggestive of a much more general and more comprehensive techno-scientific, market-economic and politico-military — or ‘synarchic’ — network, operating as the regulative engine for an emerging and overarching planetary system of algorithmic governance. In what follows, we offer an ‘app’lication of the principles of ‘synarchic regulation’ to the field of ‘algorithmic governance’.