Coding Time

Abstract

This article analyzes the various ways algorithmic logic structures, streamlines, and delimits the conception of time and memory; orders the logics of social arrangement; and delimits the political. The author considers the ways in which algorithms extend racial discrimination, rendering it less visible, less discernible, and so more difficult to address. He briefly formulates a notion of crypto-value embedded within algorithmic selfconception and elaborates an algorithmic ontology. The latter is distinguished from the contemporary understanding of the posthuman. The essay concludes with a reflection on a politics of street encounter as a counter to prevailing algorithmic constraints on the political. “Coding time” accordingly concerns the coding of time, the conception of time embedded in coding, the sociality and value that coding produces, and the implications for being and being human that the time of coding is manifesting.