CONCEPT
Algorithmic Governance (Crawford)
Crawford's term for the progressive replacement of human judgment by automated systems in decisions affecting the public — a form of power that operates through opacity rather than coercion.
Algorithmic governance is Crawford's term for the institutional arrangements in which automated systems make or shape decisions affecting publics who cannot inspect, evaluate, or hold accountable the processes by which those decisions are made. The term covers a wide range of cases: credit scoring, predictive policing, automated content moderation, algorithmic pricing, AI-mediated hiring and professional evaluation. What unites them is a structural feature: the replacement of judgment exercised by identifiable human beings who can be held to account with automated processes that operate without giving an account of themselves. Crawford argues in his 2019 essay of the same name that this replacement serves to insulate various forms of power from popular pressures, and that the resulting opacity represents a fundamental threat to democratic self-government.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept is central to Crawford's broader political-philosophical framework, which links questions about knowledge and judgment to questions about self-government. Democracy requires that citizens can evaluate the basis on which decisions affecting them