Avoiding While Gaming, Optimizing While Taming – the Ambiguous Faces of Algorithmic Resistance

In their eponymous book, Bonini and Treré (2024) identify various ways in which “Algorithms of Resistance” are both stakes (resistance to) and repertoires (resistance through) in violating platforms’ ToS (“terms of services”) along two axes: different moralities of algorithmic agency and their tactical vs. strategic manifestations.

My contribution builds on their findings complements it with a sociological perspective: by understanding algorithms through the regimes of knowledge and truth they establish, I argue to overcome the necessity of normatively anchoring practices of resistance at the violation of ToS, thus expanding notions of what such resistance could entail. The investigation is based on a qualitative content analysis of recent research literature exploring the various applications of the often-romanticized but rarely explicated idea of algorithmic “resistances” and a systematization of the practices, dimensions, aims, and results expressed therein.

Next to promoting a broader understanding of the various forms of (both collective and individual) resistance, this lens allows to interrogate algorithmic practices towards the situated power and emergent agencies that express within them while at the same time acknowledges their inherent contradictions and ambiguities: resisting algorithmic control may manifest as efforts to repair what appears to be broken (and vice-versa), “gaming” systems may inform optimization, and the disruption of algorithms may eventually become a necessity for their stabilization.