WORLD ON A WIRE

But the debate about tools like Twitter Trends is, I believe, a debate we will be having more and more often. As more and more of our online public discourse takes place on a select set of private content platforms and communication networks, and these providers turn to complex algorithms to manage, curate, and organize these massive collections, there is an important tension emerging between what we expect these algorithms to be, and what they in fact are. Not only must we recognize that these algorithms are not neutral, and that they encode political choices, and that they frame information in a particular way. We must also understand what it means that we are coming to rely on these algorithms, that we want them to be neutral, we want them to be reliable, we want them to be the effective ways in which we come to know what is most important.

Twitter Trends is only the most visible of these tools. The search engine itself, whether Google or the search bar on your favorite content site (often the same engine, under the hood), is an algorithm that promises to provide a logical set of results in response to a query, but is in fact the result of an algorithm designed to take a range of criteria into account so as to serve up results that satisfy, not just the user, but the aims of the provider, their vision of relevance or newsworthiness or public import, and the particular demands of their business model. As James Grimmelmann observed, “Search engines pride themselves on being automated, except when they aren’t.” When Amazon, or YouTube, or Facebook, offer to algorithmically and in real time report on what is “most popular” or “liked” or “most viewed” or “best selling” or “most commented” or “highest rated,” it is curating a list whose legitimacy is based on the presumption that it has not been curated. And we want them to feel that way, even to the point that we are unwilling to ask about the choices and implications of the algorithms we use every day.

CIVIC INFORMATION: an epistemological model (in this case, an algorithm) is also a polity. That is, it does to information what the city or the village does to the individual human -- makes it behave according to its noble vision of the citizen. In no way can it be allowed to be unruly.

The above lament is an almost perfect illustration of the modern gap: we want information to be perfectly MACHINED, that is godlike, free of human interference, so that we can better worship it, and at the same time we recognize that it is but a social creation and thus tainted by our sinful human culpability in shaping it and thus its magic crumbles before our eyes.

A HERO FOR OUR TIME

With the new conditions that now predominate in the society crushed under the iron heel of the spectacle, one knows, for example, that a political assassination finds itself placed in another light; can in a sense be sifted. Everywhere the mad are more numerous than before, but what is infinitely more convenient is that they can be talked about madly. And it is not some kind of reign of terror that imposes such mediatic explanations. On the contrary, it is the peaceful existence of such explanations which should cause terror.  -- Debord, Commentaires

This doesn't happen every day: It's mythic. A Nobelist for Peace kills the arch-terrorist with a stroke of a pen. From here on out, convinced Salafists can be identified as those odd people staring wistfully out to sea. And Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance, etc.

Melville: But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God -- so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis.

SCOPOPHILES

A porn film that stars actors playing famous scientists like Marie Curie, Röntgen, and the famous and sad crystallographer Rosalind Franklin. Some of the sex scenes are filmed with X-ray film stock. Incredible densities of eroticism are thus produced. At the end of the film, after the so-called "money-shot", we see the semen itself x-rayed and we see little skulls, a little inaccurately, inside the individual sperm. Then the principals are interviewed, without shame, about their experiences. The music is by Mihaly Vig.