Ethics of Coding: A Report on the Algorithmic Condition

Abstract

This report on the Ethics of Coding [EoC] presents a snapshot view through an investigation on the current state of what we call “the algorithmic condition”. By speaking of the algorithmic condition, we pick up today, in critical manner, Hannah Arendt’s question of the condition of possibility for leading an “active life” as the conditions of possibility for politics. For Arendt, this question emerged out of an altered status of knowledge that resulted in her time from being related to nature of the earth as investigated from a viewpoint in the universe, rather than one situated firmly on earthly grounds (Arendt, 1958). In doing so this report brings together discourses and objects, of the sciences and the humanities, and seeks to present a spectrum of the diversity of issues generated by this altered, novel condition, and survey of the wide-ranging considerations and potential applications of this topic. Further, this report on the ethics of coding and the algorithmic condition asks: How can we think adequately about the relation between knowledge and ethics in societies that are governed by algorithmic digital systems and objects endowed with agency? In order to attend to these latter questions, we looked at Jean-Francois Lyotard’s report from 1979 on the altered status of knowledge in “computerized societies”. Raising Arendt’s question of critique (and transcendentality of conditions of possibility) with regard to how we think about “human nature”, as well as by relating coding and programming to Lyotard’s particular notion of language games and paralogisms (Lyotard, 1979), we propose to take into account, from both viewpoints, an emerging novel “literacy” which we propose to call a “quantum literacy”. With this, we want to direct attention to the principle inadequacy of thinking about numbers and letters, mathematics and language, as two separate domains of which the former is concerned with the necessary whereas the latter deals with the contingent and interpretable. Code confronts us with an “impure” reason that cannot rid itself of amphiboly, but that is nevertheless “computable”.