algorithmic anxiety
in preparation for the RADAR event
algorithmic anxiety
Algorithmic recommendations dictate genres of culture by rewarding particular tropes with promotion in feeds, based on what immediately attracts the most attention.
In 2018, the writer Liz Pelly identified "streambait" as one such genre: the "muted, mid-tempo, melancholy pop" characteristic of Spotify. In 2019, the writer Jia Tolentino similarly
... See moreManiac fun is gone — originality, unprecedentedness, creativity and surprise disappears when so much weighs on culture’s ability to spread through digital feeds
The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across culture. By fatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most.
Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness
... See more... See moreIn her 2019 dissertation titled Algorithmic Anxiety in Contemporary Art, the scholar Patricia de Vries defined algorithmic anxiety as a condition in which "the possible self is perceived to be cir-cumscribed, bounded, and governed by algorithmic regimes." Her words feel breathtakingly accurate. The possibilities that we perceive for ourselves--our
In most areas of computing, programmers write code or train an AI model to achieve specific objectives, such as driving a car without crashing or generating humanlike text. Stanley creates systems that instead evolve, seeking novelty for its own sake. These systems sometimes discover stepping stones toward solutions that couldn’t be achieved via a... See more
Maven Is a New Social Network That Eliminates Followers—and Hopefully Stress
... See moreFilterworld consist of one fundamental, unavoidable reality: never in human history have so many people experienced the same things, the same pieces of content disseminated instantly through the feeds, to our individual screens. Every consequence flows from that fact.
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To resist Filterworld, we must become our own curators once more and take
"The algorithm is metonymic for companies as a whole," he told me. "The Facebook algorithm doesn't exist;
Facebook exists. The algorithm is a way of talking about Facebook's decisions."
— Filterworld, Kyle Chayka
What is YOUR rule of logic? How can you train your online algorithm?
The network of algorithms makes so many decisions for us, and yet we have little way of talking back to it or changing how it works.
This imbalance induces a state of passivity: We consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material.
We also adapt the way we present ourselves online to its incentives. We write
... See moreWe participate in our own surveillance by signalling our preferences so publicly.
— Filterworld, pg. 134