Algorithmic colonization Automating love and trust in the age of Big Data

Algorithms are playing crucial roles in mediating our daily life, making our choices in an increasingly efficient and automatic manner. My dissertation argues that the tendency of automating our everyday life can potentially reduce our interactive relations into an automatic enforcement of punishments and incentives, where there is no need for the social process of promises, dialogue, or shared meaning in the Big Data society. To make an in-depth analysis of this problem, I develop a critical theory approach based on Habermas’s the colonization of the lifeworld thesis, to critically capture how algorithms constantly intrude into the lifeworld, and how the intrusion can have the potential to crowd out our free interactions and exploration with others in love and trust relations. As argued, such a process of algorithmic colonization may lead to a culture of objectification, a society of manipulation, and a colonized self in the algorithmic society.