Algorithms Are Not What You Smartypants Think They Are

The next time someone mentions an “algorithm” in workaday chitchat—so, in T minus 17 seconds—ask if they have any idea what in the godforsaken digitized hell they’re talking about. “Um, you know, something something Netflix,” most will manage to mumble. Others (hipsters, mostly) will say the real question is what to do about the doomier evil of surveillance capitalism, which algorithms merely enable. Then there’s the small minority of the techishly semiliterate who will inform you that an algorithm, tut-tut, is simply a set of rules for a computer to follow. Though technically correct, I hate these stinking snoots the most. Nothing like a bare minimum of knowledge to make a person ultimately incurious about the true state of things, which is this: Grasping algorithms just enough, thinking they’re within our puny reach, only makes them more powerful.

These tangles of machinespeak are, to borrow a phrase from the eco-ontologist Timothy Morton, a kind of hyperobject—huge, diffuse entities that can’t be pinned down. If you were to somehow get past the three-headed dogbot guarding YouTube‘s reality-warping algorithm, the code would be indecipherable. At this point, not even our most overpaid programmers can make out the forest for the if/then decision trees. Algorithms, along with careless references to them, not only mystify the process by which computers run the world, they also depersonalize the all-too-real corporations exploiting the technology. The problem becomes as abstract as Morton’s favorite hyperobject, global warming, a threat so impossibly pervasive and daunting and practically post-human there’s only one solution I can possibly think to throw at it, if we’re to have any hope of survival: algorithms.

This article appears in the October issue. Subscribe now.