[szvsw]

Well written and engaging, but I think there is a lot more room to really explore what the sociological, techno-economic, power dynamic etc ramifications are of specific data structures. This doesn’t go too far beyond the surface level notion of data, and there are plenty of discussions of the historical significance of taxonomizing and “objectifying” and archiving and surveilling the world into data from Foucault to Gitelman to Hui to Galloway and more.

With a title like the one given, it would be nice to see the authors try to tease out what the political implications of a linked list, a heap, a stack a directed acyclic graph or a cyclic one, a tree, a FIFO queue, a hash table, a point cloud, a data lake, actually are… it can be difficult to really wrestle with these on an interdisciplinary and simultaneously technical & sociological/organizational level, but seems worth doing.

[barathr]

I like the idea -- I hope someone gives it a try. Like combining our essay with "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" and CLRS.

[_glass]

In my PhD thesis I am doing this, but at an organizational level, how algorithms are managed and organized, i.e., via task lists, inside of the system, e.g., the debugger, or virtual meetings. There was a clear discovery of the movement away from the code, but also that we should really think about how the algorithm sees things, and how it is taking on a subjectivity on its own, as an actor.

This approach is postmodern, by describing hyper-reality, so taking in things that management theory would approach as only superficial, and putting this into the foreground. Your idea is actually brilliant, to go one step further and check the individual implementation details. I think there is some work about algorithms, but mostly for the AI case.

[Zababa]

Yeah, the author does not seem to know what a data structure is, or assume the reader does not know and won't mind.

[TeMPOraL]

Feels that if anything, the author is describing computational abstractions, not data structures per se. They mention the term in the text, but then continue to say "data structure" while talking about everything except data structures. For example:

"a local cafe is no longer a community hangout but a data structure containing a menu, a list of reservation options, and a hundred 5-star ratings"

This description is focusing on the "not data structure" parts like what is there, what it means, and what can be done with it; the data structure part would be, how it's arranged and what the impact of that is.

It's still clear what the author means, and they are using the relevant terminology, just the irony is in details being named opposite to what they should be.

[barathr]

It's a general-audience essay, not one targeted towards the HN community. So unfortunately there's little opportunity to delve any deeper into what specific data structures are involved in holding the data and the difference that might make. There are data structures underneath in the excerpt you pulled out and they're so common in code that we don't even notice it. (Even something as simple as this: certain data structures are better for finding recent / first items and others are better for finding "top" / largest items. That has implications that ripple upward and can skew what users are shown.) It would be nice to consider the differences in how different data structures store data and their broader implications.

[Zababa]

Sorry, my comment was harsher than it needed to be. I've struggled with belonging where most people seem to fit in, but on the other hand I've benefited greatly, I think, from the processes that make me a taxable citizen rather than a member of a community.

[barathr]

What we're hoping for (and is the theme of the piece) is that we are and can and should be both and more -- taxable citizens, members of illegible communities, and many more things. It's a both-and perspective -- life is and should be composed of many overlapping systems.

[Jensson]

That sounds like a database, how is that not a data structure? And to that data structure the cafe is just a bunch of values, which he listed. That is how you see things like a data structure would.

Definition of data structure: "More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data".

Maybe you would want more generic data structures, but it is used accurately here.

[abtinf]

Word salad.

[szvsw]

Sorry! More succinctly: the authors explore politics of data, as opposed to politics of data structures. I’m curious what the latter would really look like.

[walterbell]

Any recommendations from other writers on "politics of data"?

[CyberDildonics]

It really is, it seems more like satire of a comment than a comment.