What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing

by Ed Finn

Replacing the public sphere with the programmable sphere is ultimately a substitution of one form of reading for another: a new idiomatic frame to put on the world. Leaving behind the readers of the Spectator in an eighteenth-century London coffeehouse, we find the readers of algorithmic process, interpreting Twitter feeds and web traffic counts over Wi-Fi at Starbucks. The grammar of the new algorithmic sphere obscures certain operations while making others more visible, and the spectacle of the blockchain is merely one of the newer ways that we have invested these cultural systems with enormous power. We are all becoming more adept at the practice of critical arbitrage because our systems, the flooded streams of cultural data, require it. The interplay of glass boxes and black boxes demands an algorithmic attention to data processes, an algorithmic reading that we are all practicing already.