Algorithmic Capitalism

Algorithmic capitalism is what happens when print capitalism—Benedict Anderson's term for the economic engine that produced nations—completes its circuit and begins generating communities of a new kind. The publishers of the eighteenth century were not engaged in nation-formation; they were engaged in profit-seeking, and the vernacular reading publics they created were a commercial externality. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and their competitors are not primarily engaged in community-formation either; they are building commercially viable products. But the externality of algorithmic capitalism is identical in structure to the externality of print capitalism: a community of practice that forms around the shared experience of a new technology of reproduction, constituting itself through simultaneity, fixing itself around a common reference point, and elevating a new vernacular—natural language—to the status of a building language. Where imagined communities produced by print capitalism were bounded by vernacular languages and roughly corresponded to territorial states,