Inhabited by Algorithms

Abstract

This editorial introduces a special issue exploring the intersections between technology, identity, and social life in the digital age. Taking the prosthesis as a paradigmatic figure, it argues that technological mediation is not external to the human condition but constitutive of it: from bodily devices to algorithmic environments, artifacts co-produce subjectivities, redistribute agency, and reconfigure the norms through which bodies, capacities, and identities are recognized. Drawing on STS, sociology of the body, and the framework of algomorphic society, the editorial examines how digital platforms and AI-based systems — understood as semi-autonomous relational actors — reshape self-presentation, emotional regulation, and practices of recognition. The contributions gathered in the issue address phenomena including algorithmic legitimation, AI imaginaries among young adults, online shaming, moral panic, and the attention architectures of digital childhood. Together, they interrogate the threshold at which technology ceases to be a support and becomes a co-constitutive matrix of social experience.