Visualizing the Invisible: Observing How Algorithms Observe Us

That people’s ways of thinking, their “ways of seeing,” and their values are shaped — often unknowingly — by some configuration of power has long been central to sociology, from Foucault’s power/knowledge to Bourdieu’s symbolic power. In such classical accounts, the locus of this shaping could still be named: the state, the dominant class, a field.

With the full arrival of the age of AI, this “who” has grown opaque. Recommendation, ranking, and generative systems shape what we notice, desire, and take to be real, yet who — or what — exercises this influence resists a clear answer. A new social reality is being composed under the authority of algorithms. The problem is less “how algorithms affect society” than this: how can we see a reality whose shaping has become distributed, automated, and largely invisible?

Here sociocybernetics is unusually well equipped. Cybernetics is the science of feedback and steering, and algorithmic systems are precisely that: they watch us, adjust what we see, and learn from our reactions, in self-reinforcing loops. Its second-order method — the art of observing the observer (von Foerster, Luhmann) — asks not what we see but how our seeing is framed, and where its blind spots lie. Making those blind spots visible is how the invisible becomes visible.

This session asks how invisible power can be made observable, and what practical, reflexive role sociology can play in the algorithmic age. Where the problem-interest is shared, both theoretical and empirical work is welcome.