roomthily

But — and maybe this is what you’re getting at — what spooks me about algorithms as nature is precisely that they have no distortion, they have no affordance, there’s no purchase on the world they describe. Their illegible nature is, quite literally, a world without narrative. There’s only a beginning and an end. What’s important to me about the kinds of things we were doing with Area/Code — and all the designers around us — is that we were building systems in the middle of the data, some systems that gave us a way to read, and reasons to read it. The stories we were telling with locative games were fiction, but as always, good fiction describes the real world rather precisely.

The real problem with algorithms is that they often involve us but they are completely alien to us (in the Bogostian sense). They are operationally closed. Operational Closure means that things may work in ways that are not at all obvious to us, neither at first nor after we poke into them because any kind of sense we make of it is either partial or does not translate into our frame of reference. Algorithms get inputs and perform outputs but the way they operate on these has nothing to do with how we as humans think about the world. Think is not even the right word, but we try to relate to them from our human cognition. The machines see us, but they do not ‘see’ us in any way we would recognize as seeing and we have no idea what it is that they see.