THE ALGORITHMIC LOGIC AND THE QUESTION OF POWER: A REFLECTION FROM FOUCAULT

Considering the massive presence of computer technologies in people's daily lives and how they influence the acquisition of habits nowadays, this writing has a purpose of analyzing, from Foucault (1987; 2008; 2015), the operation mode of power through technologies. For that, we assume the Foucauldian concepts of power and device. The first as an operation implied and exercised on all sides of society, crossed by a calculation that has specific aims and objectives, and the second one as an apparatus, a network, that manages and belongs to happening, whose dimension would have a dominant strategic function. It's considered that computational calculation tools, the algorithms, influence the way users browse the web. By data extractivism, the algorithms can personalize the users experience, promoting the consumption and the voluntary provision of data. The idea of pastoral power as conduction of the collective and the individual, simultaneously and in a certain direction, and the panoptism as a surveillance strategy, seem appropriate to consider government practice, of direction, via algorithms. From this, we consider digital technologies compose a new instance of power coupled with neoliberal discourses, which produce a sense of minimization between those who hold power and those who are submitted to it, making the subject operate the power over himself. Finally, we propose to think struggles and resistance as counter-conducts to this form of government.