DISSERTATION
ABSTRACT
- (defense expected May 2026)
My dissertation project begins from the premise that ‘the algorithm’ is a collective speculation toward utopia. More than a set of technoscientific practices, material infrastructures, or forces of production, the algorithm is also a collection of desires that has mediated political imagination since at least the socialist calculation debates. Tracing an unconventional genealogy of the concept, I depart from typical narrations of its history as a progression of scientific inventions from the 1950s-present. I instead center a technological imaginary of the 1910-40s, one forged between socialists and neoliberals to answer the question of central planning. That the promise of AI rings so hollow today, I suggest, owes to our inheritance of the political unconscious of these debates. The concept of the algorithm was forged within a fundamentally elite discourse, one that imagined utopia as a rational economic order (whether realized by technocratic management or by spontaneous coordination) that will always disqualify popular and proletarian modes of economic planning. In this way, I reframe the history of computing as a history of political struggle.