The pragmatist’s approach gestures toward, and often depends on, a deeper philosophical claim about the nature of the universe. We need to understand that claim as the grounding for the notion of “effective computability,” a transformational concept in computer science that fuels algorithmic evangelism today. In her book My Mother Was a Computer, media theorist N. Katherine Hayles labels this philosophical claim the Regime of Computation.16 This is another term for what I sometimes refer to as the age of the algorithm: the era dominated by the figure of the algorithm as an ontological
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