• Algoritmi
• Burocrazia
• Facebook
• Max Weber
• Razionalizzazione

The use of the idea of bureaucracy to make sense of the power of algorithms in today’s society is explored. It is shown how it can help highlight cultural affinities, historical continuities, and conceptual homologies, demystify discourses on the radical novelty of new technologies, as well as indicate the replacement of old administrative techniques by the latter. Max Weber’s landmark reflections on bureaucracy are reconstructed in detail, and some key elements of them are deployed to interpret the social meaning and implications of the spread of digital technologies, focusing on the case of Facebook. It is shown that the social media platform can be seen as bureaucratic in many respects, such as formalization, explicitation of previously implicit norms, centralization, increase in the extent of “manageability” of practices and relations, centrality of knowledge, and passive democratization. The social networking site can thus be claimed to extend bureaucratic logics to a domain to which they were traditionally alien, viz. that of private relationships and interactions. Moreover, it is argued that Weber’s concerns about the problems and risks of bureaucratic power are partly relevant also about today’s algorithmic power.