Algorithms are integral to a digital, networked, automated society. Thrown into the public spotlight by a certain high profile search engine, algorithms are increasingly recognised to exercise agency in practices such as governance, surveillance, online personalisation, medicine, design, high frequency trading, credit scoring and plagiarism. Computational machines make decisions about things, people, places and experiences, and humans learn to address algorithms.
Algorithms have inhuman capacities. They do not become distracted, tired, impatient or emotional. At the same time the algorithm’s inhuman abilities can be understood as a desirable improvement on human skills. Algorithms are inhuman forces that bring social, political, material and cultural formations into being, generating and extinguishing possibilities. Their inhumanism transmutes ideas of the human and demands new (post)humanisms. This issue of Transformations presents contributions that address the inhuman algorithm.