The Footprint and the Algorithm: Meaning, Mediation, and the Systems We Make (Systems & Meaning)

We live in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms, platforms, and AI systems—yet the concepts we rely on to understand them were built for another age. The result is a growing divide between the sciences and the humanities, between information and meaning, between the technologies we create and our ability to think clearly about them.

In The Footprint and the Algorithm, Michael Filimowicz argues that this fragmentation is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Across nine original essays, he develops a powerful new framework for understanding how signs, media, technology, and knowledge interact. Moving effortlessly between philosophy, semiotics, cognitive science, media theory, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence, he introduces a series of original concepts that illuminate some of the defining questions of our time:

• What makes an AI-generated image fundamentally different from a photograph?
• How do algorithms quietly shape what we perceive, know, and believe?
• Why has communication between academic disciplines become so difficult?
• What would it take to rebuild a more integrated understanding of knowledge?

Rather than offering another critique of technology, The Footprint and the Algorithm provides something rarer: new conceptual tools for thinking about it. Rigorous yet accessible, ambitious without dogmatism, it invites readers to cross disciplinary boundaries and see familiar problems from entirely new perspectives.

For philosophers, technologists, designers, scholars, students, and intellectually curious readers alike, this is an invitation to rethink not only our technologies, but the ways we make meaning in an increasingly algorithmic world.