Participatory Engineering of Algorithmic Social Technologies: An Extended Book Review of David G. Robinson’s Voices in the Code

David G. Robinson’s book reviewed here, Voices in the Code, approaches the issue of governance and regulation of algorithmic social technologies with a case study-orientation that offers a grounding in the details, illuminating the fundamentally sociological and processual nature of modern governance issues that are mostly missed or left implicit in academic, regulatory, and legislative discussions. This important book urges us to design adaptive, malleable, and evolvable participatory organizational structures instead. Accepting the author’s invitation to carry the torch forward, this review builds and extends the book’s arguments by presenting broad and transferable insights on regulation and governance of the cybernetic artifacts that structure and steer our lives.