David Garcia wrote: Not a day passes without another strange event as a consequence of > of the fact that digital platforms are no longer simply -facilitating - > recording - analysing- the world but Increasingly INTERVENING. > Furthermore as these interventions are overwhelmingly > automated and therefore instaneous, we see a collapse in the > tradional (deliberative) space between knowing and acting. > The epistemic and existentialist consequences of the dissapearence of this > space is as yet unknown. They are there to be both feared and explored.. > > This is true. The unintended social consequences of algorithmic routines have begun interacting with people who are also caught in preexisting social routines, and that interaction produces yet more unintended consequences as the algorithms redploy themselves within the new context. A spiral of expansive acceleration then ensues. You can see it in social movments, in ad campaigns, in politics (which is perhaps redundant, after ad campaigns) and presumably it is occurring in other algorithm-governed interactions, maybe in worker management routines, or on large platforms like Uber, or in real-time traffic control systems, etc.
Social movements in the US have been riding this tiger pretty well, from Black Lives Matter to Me Too. The Trump movement has also ridden it very effectively. In none of those cases, however, is there a pure network model at work, where all consequences can be deduced from the behavior of the computer systems. Instead, their inputs disturbs the (often horrible) dynamic equilibrium of some existing social set-up. The intervening algos provoke momentary volcanoes in what the philsopher Castoriadis would have called the existing "social-historical magma." So the conflicts and grieds of the past keep erupting in new hot spots and in new ways, touching and involving people whom they formerly did not (or only did in a very stable way). The locals in Hawai'i are OK with the volcano erupting, because Pele (the volcano) is what made the island. The left has to take this attitude, otherwise we will fall into unconscious reactionary dynamics, which has happened to the right already. It's spot on to say that the (unintended) consequences shold be both feared and explored. Because of them, deep aspirations and deep horrors are bursting into the present. To revel in them is naive. To turn away is dangerous. thanks for some very clear thinking, Brian
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