From Classification to Communion: The Limits of Algorithmic Governance and Eucharistic Counter-Ritual

This essay argues that algorithmic governance is not merely a technical framework for regulating AI but a ritualized social order that forms subjects, manages thresholds of belonging, and organizes collective expectations of the future. Drawing on Bell (1992), I interpret audits, scores, and oversight procedures as practices of ritualization that authorize certain judgments as objective and trustworthy. With Turner (1969), I show how algorithmic systems govern liminal moments—hiring, credit, and welfare—by converting uncertainty into administratively legible transitions. Against this, Wainwright’s Eucharist and Eschatology (1971) offers a theological critique: algorithmic governance is teleologically thin, habituating communities to prediction and control rather than promise and reconciliation. I therefore propose a eucharistic counter-ritual: communal practices of discernment that resist reducing persons to sortable data and form them for participation in a future received as promise rather than managed as risk within contemporary regimes of algorithmic authority, administrative sorting, and anticipatory governance.