The Tyranny of Algorithms is obviously a polemical title to start a conversation around computation and culture. But I think that it helps us get into the cultural, the political, the legal, the ethical dimensions of code. Because we so often think of code, and code is so often constructed, in a purely technical framework, by people who see themselves as solving technical problems.
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I want to think more broadly about the future of cyber state, and think about accumulations of power both centralized and distributed that might require transparency in boundaries we wouldn’t be used to.
Most companies […] don’t deliberately want to be malicious in the technology that they’re making. However, if you don’t think about the fact that your solution is not the only one, and is going to enter into a whole host of different things, then you are going to end up causing problems and it might as well be malice.
I often try to tell people that Google is not providing information retrieval algorithms, it’s providing advertising algorithms. And that is a very important distinction when we think about what kind of information is available in these corporate-controlled spaces.
This quote’s from Andy Warhol. He was looking at America and saying America’s different. He’s saying, “Well, Elizabeth Taylor’s drinking Coke and I’m drinking Coke and the bum on the street’s drinking Coke, and it’s all the same thing.” For the first time in history, mass market culture has allowed us all to enjoy the same thing. This is not champagne. The bum on the street can’t afford champagne.
How would we begin to look at the production of the algorithmic? Not the production of algorithms, but the production of the algorithmic as a justifiable, legitimate mechanism for knowledge production. Where is that being established and how do we examine it?
It seems to me that to confront algorithms on their own terms, we may have to modify our preoccupation with the politics of knowledge and take up an interest in the politics of logistical engineering.
This is why it matters whether algorithms can be agonist, given their roles in governance. When the logic of algorithms is understood as autocratic, we’re going to feel powerless and panicked because we can’t possibly intervene. If we assume that they’re deliberately democratic, we’ll assume an Internet of equal agents, rational debate, and emerging consensus positions, which probably doesn’t sound like the Internet that many of us actually recognize.
I wonder with all these varying levels of needs that we have as users, and as we live more and more of our lives digitally and on social media, what would it look like to design a semi-private space in a public network?
Pretty much anything that Lucifer says in Paradise Lost, you could probably imagine the CEO of Uber saying. They’re just disrupting the Heavenly orders, you know. They really needed it.