Ghosts in the Algorithmic System

Every scroll feels effortless. With a simple scroll, our screens are filled with an endless stream of user-generated content: TikTok videos, Twitter posts, and Instagram photos. The seemingly seamless delivery of such content from backend databases to users’ newsfeeds is often attributed to “the algorithm.” Drawing on long-term fieldwork inside a leading social media platform company in China, this talk shows that the algorithm is only one small node within a vast information infrastructure that sustains the circulation of digital content. I follow the lives and work of IT practitioners, from elite engineers at Beijing headquarters to moderators in Sichuan clickwork warehouses, asking how they form different nodes within this infrastructure and how their interactions generate unintended consequences. What is commonly understood as the “algorithmic effect” is, the outcome of heterogeneous actants, including engineers, moderators, user traces, metrics, and recursive programs, as they work together, clash, and haunt the system from within. These are the ghosts in the algorithmic system.

About the Speaker

Ken Zheng is an ethnographic writer and digital anthropologist. She received her PhD in Anthropology at University College London and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre on China in the World. Her research examines the unseen infrastructures of Chinese social media platforms, with particular attention to the materiality of data, the operational role of metrics such as DAU, and the technical vocabularies through which IT professionals understand platform infrastructure and their own positionality within it. During fieldwork, she gained hands-on industry experience by working alongside developers, participating in the everyday processes through which algorithmic systems were designed. Her forthcoming project investigates the transnational circulation of Chinese emotion AI systems in Southeast Asia, exploring how these systems generate new forms of affective governance. Beyond academia, she works with photography and documentary forms, and occasionally curates independent exhibitions.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.