Design Anthropology, Algorithmic Bias, Behavioral Capital, and the Creator Economy

Abstract

As algorithms become increasingly responsible for discovering information, how we choose to design them will have a significant impact on our collective lived experience. One example is how algorithmic bias affects the estimated 50 million people that make up the creator economy. This group of independent creators is financially dependent on recommender systems to suggest their content. Currently, most recommender system designs produce rich-get-richer dynamics, resulting in structural inequalities that favor some over others. This article details a design anthropology approach for creating a new model of sociality and business that rewards behavioral capital.

Steps to an Ecology of Algorithms

“…Put another way, such ecologies involve an ontological politics that, for anthropology, warrants attending to the question of what their existence means for ways of composing worlds (Stengers 2018). Should there be a "design anthropology" (Artz 2022) so that we can be algorithmically correct and avoid bias? Or is a state-incorporated "new anthropology" that deploys algorithmic government on the rise (Anderson 2022), and, if so, what do we do about it beyond slick terminological innovations on politically inconsequential fieldsites?…”

The Digital Turn in Business Anthropology

“…The rationale for this is two-fold. First, business anthropologists are increasingly studying and working with emerging digital technologies such as generative AI, large language models (LLMs), knowledge graphs, robotics, data science, and recommendation engines (Artz 2022(Artz , 2023Koycheva 2023;Hillier 2023;Paff 2021;Seaver 2023). The exploration of digital technologies is not a recent development in anthropology.…”