Here's an idea-- algorithms might
have a spiritual component.
You know what's neat about technology?
Lots of things-- the self driving car,
millions of scanned books, Bitcoin, Doge,
Dogecoin-- which is real, I promise-- and data
and all of the capabilities that come
when you pair that data with awesome computing power,
searchability, sortability, context, pattern recognition--
in short, information.
Of course, as Mr. Noam Chomsky has reminded us recently,
technologt-- like any other tool--
doesn't know or care if it's being used to do good or run
the Death Star.
The power is in the possibly black leather gloved hands
of the people using the tech.
But for all of the potentially rotten things going down
behind the big red curtain of big data,
the men behind which you should certainly pay no attention to,
there's also a lot to be said about the positive stuff--
the power of search and being able to find what you're
looking for, being able to relate seemingly
worlds apart pieces of data and being
able to create on-cover relationships where we never
thought they existed.
It seems sometimes that we're on a kind of crusade
to digitize as much of the world and the data in it
as we possibly can.
And when the whole world has been
turned into a kind of text-- or better yet,
a database-- it becomes this awesome transmutable
thing that we crunch, mash, compare, measure, and display.
And the beating heart at the center of that warm growing
body of data transmutation-- and, increasingly, the world
itself-- is the algorithm.
Algorithm is another way of saying instruction,
but that's kind of like saying the Bible is a book or John
Barrowman is an actor.
It's incomplete.
Algorithms take some input, some value or data or set of data,
and depending upon how they're designed,
they produce an output, some other value or set of data.
But as you might suspect, there's
essentially no restriction on what
that input or output might be.
There are algorithms which track global climate, shipping
prices, crop yields, and upwards of a million other data
points to ensure that certain store bought
orange juice brands maintain tastebud pleasing consistency.
Mm, nature.
As of last year, roughly 50% of stock market equity trading
volume in the United States came from high frequency trading
firms.
These firms use algorithms to monitor markets and trends
and make super quick human unassisted trades in response
to everything, even news stories and Twitter
bugs, which can cause problems.
Algorithms write newspaper headlines and even
some newspaper stories.
They detect faces and pair soulmates.
They recommend books and movies, they build your playlists,
they influence your search results
and decide which of your friends and YouTube subscriptions
you see the most of-- hopefully it's us.
The force of algorithms is incredible,
though they themselves are frequently invisible.
They are embedded and purposefully hidden,
sometimes in plain sight, sometimes
arcane and inscrutable or so omnipresent that we just think,
oh, that's just how that works.
For all of their power, pervasive yet invisible,
dispassionate yet responsive, algorithms
might even approach something of a spiritual level of influence.
Of course, we don't pray to the algorithm,
though for all of the important stuff over which they hold
person designed though semi autonomous authority--
they can control our money, pilot aircraft,
formulate medications, diagnose diseases, design
and run political campaigns.
Maybe we might as well.
And speaking of political campaigns,
it might also be fair to say that algorithms come with
or reinforce some complex ideological stuff, too.
Search result algorithms like Amazon's or Google's page rank,
newsfeed algorithms like the one Facebook
uses-- they work really hard to show you things
that they think you're going to want to see.
They cater to your interests, which
means you could become isolated from things
the computer brain thinks you're not interested in.
Like if you've done lots of searching related to soccer
and you Google Michael Rugnetta, maybe you're
more likely to get my Googleganger, soccer coach
Michael Rugnetta and not me, Michael Rugnetta.
Eli Pariser developed and named this phenomenon
the Filter Bubble in his book "The Filter Bubble."
He wants not about soccer coaches,
but about the dangers of being isolated
from people and media that don't share your view of the world.
Pariser warns that quote, algorithmic induction
can lead to a kind of information determinism,
where our past click streams can entirely decide our future.
He fears quote, a public sphere sorted and manipulated
by algorithms, fragmented by design and hostile to dialogue.
I'm going to go ahead and say that I find that
a little alarmist.
And Pariser's Filter Bubble Theory
has come under lots of criticism for being exactly that.
But it is perhaps the alarmist version
of another very important question
that lots of very smart people are curious about.
Can you collect and operate on and use data
without changing it?
Its kind of like ye olde observer
effect, which warns that the very moment you measured
or observe something, you run the risk of changing
that thing-- except this one is clicks and your Amazon purchase
history and orange juice, I guess.
And furthermore, the people-- users, consumers, followers,
subjects, whatever you want to call them--
who are exposed to the effects of the algorithm.
When it's unclear who has the agency,
do I control my internet search result destiny, does Google,
does-- I don't know-- Coca Cola?
It's easy to assume that things are outside of your control,
and while we don't right now, I wonder
what's to stop us from eventually looking
towards computers and algorithms for more serious things that
are outside of our control.
Will we look to algorithms for hope?
Will an algorithm bring me love?
Maybe.
Can algorithms fight evil?
Some police commissioners would certainly say, yes.
They do fight our wars, though now we're
right back into the complex ideological stuff.
As the world becomes increasingly readable
by, and possibly made for, powerful computational
processes, it perhaps behooves us
to respect the powerful truth of their presence.
And then, of course, welcome our hopefully benevolent orange
juice and tax refund managing overlords.
What do you guys think?
Are there places where the power of technology and algorithms
align with common attitudes about spiritual influence
in the world?
Let us know in the comments.
And subscribing might not bring you love, but it will certainly
bring you ideas-- and my face, which, you know,
could go either way, whether or not you want that.
I spent an irresponsible amount of time
over the break playing "Sine Mora."
Let's see what you guys had to say about Bullet Hell games.
Worldtakeyourplace asks, why stop at Bullet Hell games
and says that every game can be meditative in some way
because it's not the business of the real world.
And yeah, I think, you know, there
are a lot of people that seemed to say
that any game that if you are involved in it,
you can get to this state of just throwing away
the rest of the world and just being there, playing the game.
So yeah, I totally buy it.
Brightorangepants' comment reminded me of a passage
from "Pink Noises," which I'm currently reading, um,
in the section where Tara Rodgers is talking
to this famous composer, Pauline Oliveros, who
plays the accordion and controls a computer with foot pedals
at the same time.
And Pauline Oliveros says, uh, and my feet
know what to do but if I tried to tell my feet what to do,
it would be too late and I would lose the moment.
It's almost as if there's somebody else there doing this.
I know my feet are moving and I'm moving them,
but they're moving.
The feet are moving.
I think that those two things are very much related.
sqQueebble's comment about reaching this mental state
with other games, including puzzle games,
made me think about Rubik's cube solvers.
I wonder if people who solve Rubik's cubes really quickly--
I wonder how they characterize their involvement with that
object.
Like, are they thinking or is it just happening?
I don't know.
Any Rubik's cube geniuses out there?
GodlessPastellEquine very rightly
wonders what I meant when I said that being in the zone
while playing Dark Souls has some relationship to self
respect, and Hanzo Sky basically says what I meant.
As far as I understand it, and I've
played very little Dark Souls, it
seems like there is tons and tons
of grinding that has to be done for you to get to the point
where you can just, like, zone out and move through the game.
Maybe I'm totally wrong.
Also, self respect was kind of the wrong thing to say.
So for anybody that I offended, I apologize.
That was a bad choice of words.
A very fair point, Hugo the Poet-- double laser
cannons for everybody.
Trikeman 278 and a bunch of other people
pointed out the relationship of this idea to the one of flow
developed by Mihaly Csikszwentmihalyi
and how it has a very pertinent place in game design.
And, uh, yeah, this is a great point and a thing
that we definitely left out.
So if you're interested in this, you should definitely
do some Google.
We'll put some links in the description, too.
Yeah.
Thank you for that suggestion.
Very good point, Slayer Jesse.
I want to sincerely apologize not only to the people who
are still reading TV Tropes three weeks after this episode
was uploaded, but also to their families who probably haven't
seen them for a very long time.
I'll think better of mentioning TV Tropes next time.
Sr Boris says that the meditative state
you get into playing video games is
very different from the one you can get into by meditating
because the point of classical meditation
is to shut off all stimulus, whereas the point of Bullet
Hell games is maybe to overstimulate.
Marie Soullier weirdly kind of agrees,
but says that that classical idea of what
meditation accomplishes is not necessarily
a positive experience.
And I think that this gets to the heart of a lot of comments
that I saw where people were saying that it's hard to define
meditation as just one thing.
And I totally stand by that and think
that that's maybe, like, the bigger
takeaway from this episode.
To Megan Rivera, if you haven't found them
in the intervening three weeks, plenty of people
have taken care of this for you.
I will put some links in the description.
This week's episode was brought you
by the hard work of these ghosts in the machine.
We have an IRC, a Subreddit, and a Facebook page
links in the description.
And this week's Tweet of the Week
is not a Tweet of the Week, but a video of the month.
Mr. Brian Block made an "Idea Channel"-like episode
as a lead-up to proposing to his now fiance, Tyrza,
and it is just-- I-- words-- you should just watch it.
You-- congratulations, you crazy kids.
And one more thing, as if that wasn't enough.
Just to give you some fair warning, seeing
as how it's the new year.
We are going to start switching out record covers.
So we're going to do one a week until they're all completely
different. "Sword and Sorcery" is going to be the last to go
because I know it's your favorite.
But just so you know, fair warning-- things
are going to change just slightly.