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January 19, 2015 6:26 AM Subscribe
In this essay I argue that an important recent development in the struggle to represent algorithms is that computer algorithms now have their own public relations. That is, they have both a public-facing identity and new promotional discourses that depict them as efficient, valuable, powerful, and objective. It is vital that we understand how the algorithms that dominate our experience operate upon us. Yet commercial companies -a recent phenomenon- now systematically manage our image of algorithms and the information we receive about them. Algorithms themselves, rather than just the companies that operate them, have become the subject of mass marketing claims. To make this clear, I analyze a variety of visual and multimedia depictions of algorithms. I begin by reviewing a variety of historical and contemporary attempts to represent algorithms for novices in educational settings, and then I compare these to recent commercial depictions. I will conclude with a critique of current trends and a call for a counter-visuality that can resist them.
I will speak from direct experience here. In 2012, my website was punished by the Google algorithm (in the so-called "Penguin" update). The result was that when people searched for information that my site featured - even when my site was the only site that featured this information - my site would not be listed on Google's first page of the search results, and would often be listed behind other pages that were not relevant to the search.
Google engineers took no responsibility for this situation. They said "that's what the algorithm is designed to do", and the discussion ended.
Support volunteers on Google's forum (the closest that Google offers to customer service) treated the punishment by the algorithm as a sign from God. Instead of even considering the possibility that maybe the algorithm was incorrect, they simply came up with a litany of reasons as to why I was wrong to even question the algorithm, and usually ended their discussion with "you shouldn't feel an entitlement for Google to judge your content favorably".
Since Google is private, I was powerless. I could not "contact my elected representative" - Google isn't an elected body. I could not appeal since Google doesn't even treat websites as "customers". Since Google is ubiquitous (capturing 75% of searches in the US, and up to 90% in some European countries), I realized that my very existence was at the mercy of Google.
What shocked me is that even when I was able to gain the attention of actual Google engineers, they did even not seem to understand their algorithm completely - though they never questioned it (at least not publicly). Google's followers most certainly did not question it - it was a symbol of supreme worthiness.
See the problem here? We have come to rely on Google to "judge" websites that we search for, but Google is unconstrained - they are beyond all elected governments. This is, in many ways, like a credit rating - a single number that has the ability to make or break your life. Credit ratings, however, are more transparent, because by law, the rating companies must at least divulge the inputs they keep on people.
Can you imagine going for your annual performance review and being fired, not because of anything that your manager says or believes, but because an algorithm said that you should be fired? Now can you imagine having that algorithm be tied to you as a person, so that when you apply to job after job, the company uses this algorithm to judge you?
This is where we are headed.
posted by RalphSlate at 7:42 AM on January 19, 2015 [17 favorites]
Google engineers took no responsibility for this situation. They said "that's what the algorithm is designed to do", and the discussion ended.
Support volunteers on Google's forum (the closest that Google offers to customer service) treated the punishment by the algorithm as a sign from God. Instead of even considering the possibility that maybe the algorithm was incorrect, they simply came up with a litany of reasons as to why I was wrong to even question the algorithm, and usually ended their discussion with "you shouldn't feel an entitlement for Google to judge your content favorably".
Since Google is private, I was powerless. I could not "contact my elected representative" - Google isn't an elected body. I could not appeal since Google doesn't even treat websites as "customers". Since Google is ubiquitous (capturing 75% of searches in the US, and up to 90% in some European countries), I realized that my very existence was at the mercy of Google.
What shocked me is that even when I was able to gain the attention of actual Google engineers, they did even not seem to understand their algorithm completely - though they never questioned it (at least not publicly). Google's followers most certainly did not question it - it was a symbol of supreme worthiness.
See the problem here? We have come to rely on Google to "judge" websites that we search for, but Google is unconstrained - they are beyond all elected governments. This is, in many ways, like a credit rating - a single number that has the ability to make or break your life. Credit ratings, however, are more transparent, because by law, the rating companies must at least divulge the inputs they keep on people.
Can you imagine going for your annual performance review and being fired, not because of anything that your manager says or believes, but because an algorithm said that you should be fired? Now can you imagine having that algorithm be tied to you as a person, so that when you apply to job after job, the company uses this algorithm to judge you?
This is where we are headed.
posted by RalphSlate at 7:42 AM on January 19, 2015 [17 favorites]
Eternal order is prescribed by the Sacred Algorithm. All things flow from the Sacred Algorithm: all things in their place, all users on their logins, all searches flowing, all ads showing—pays homage to the Sacred Algorithm in its own particular preordained position. So it is!
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 7:59 AM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 7:59 AM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
It's fairly natural to have a certain resentment of what we cannot see or control, but that has power over us. It's also curious to see how that resentment has been transplanted from the faceless human making arbitrary decisions (see Brazil and the faceless civil bureaucracy full of uncaring, apathetic human beings, or the conniving Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life), to the decidedly un-arbitrary, but equally unknowable algorithm. It feels like a "no-win" situation, but I would argue that at least we may come to understand and control the algorithm, but can never make Mr. Potter more caring.
And to respond more directly to the comments, it is not true that Google answers to no one, because clearly it will respond to a higher power as Europe's new privacy laws and consumer protection laws for digital goods will attest to. It responds to the same thing that powerful companies through history have, consumer sentiment, demand, and political will. Perhaps this is a discussion best approached as a political problem, not a technology problem.
posted by Jacks Dented Yugo at 8:05 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
And to respond more directly to the comments, it is not true that Google answers to no one, because clearly it will respond to a higher power as Europe's new privacy laws and consumer protection laws for digital goods will attest to. It responds to the same thing that powerful companies through history have, consumer sentiment, demand, and political will. Perhaps this is a discussion best approached as a political problem, not a technology problem.
posted by Jacks Dented Yugo at 8:05 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Christian Sandvig is awesome and is one of the scholars in the video. If you don't have time to watch the video of the talk he, Karrie Karahalios, and Cedric Langbort gave, you can read a summary blog post on auditing the Facebook News Feed algorithm.
posted by honest knave at 8:20 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by honest knave at 8:20 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
You're sorely mistaken if you think there's nothing arbitrary about algorithms. They are essentially arbitrary constructs that we keep tweaking until we get the outputs we want from whatever inputs we want. Only the inputs and outputs aren't arbitrary, really, and those are still arbitrary to the extent they are based on requirements that may or may not be well understood.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:27 AM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by saulgoodman at 8:27 AM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
Algorithms have no feelings and no judgment, they view all things the way they are told to view them. This is not to say that they cannot be manipulated to favor one thing over another either by their creator or by someone who has found a way to game them, but that they are totally consistent in that manipulation and therefore predictable, with enough knowledge.
The alternative is human gatekeepers: journalists, DJs, movie reviewers, ad men, and so on, all of which are corruptible to a far greater degree than a computer algorithm. I, for one, would prefer predictability over payola. I find the algorithms in my life (Google Search, Amazon Reviews and Recommendations, Rotten Tomatoes aggregate scores, etc.) much preferable to the way I made decisions before.
I feel the article's point is a salient one: we need to understand algorithms and they way they affect our lives. And we should damn their mistakes, but I can't get behind the doomspeak RalphSlate speaks of. I've had bosses who gave me arbitrarily bad reviews for no reason other than they didn't like the way I looked or because they we having a bad day. I’d have preferred an algorithm in those cases.
posted by Jacks Dented Yugo at 8:57 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
The alternative is human gatekeepers: journalists, DJs, movie reviewers, ad men, and so on, all of which are corruptible to a far greater degree than a computer algorithm. I, for one, would prefer predictability over payola. I find the algorithms in my life (Google Search, Amazon Reviews and Recommendations, Rotten Tomatoes aggregate scores, etc.) much preferable to the way I made decisions before.
I feel the article's point is a salient one: we need to understand algorithms and they way they affect our lives. And we should damn their mistakes, but I can't get behind the doomspeak RalphSlate speaks of. I've had bosses who gave me arbitrarily bad reviews for no reason other than they didn't like the way I looked or because they we having a bad day. I’d have preferred an algorithm in those cases.
posted by Jacks Dented Yugo at 8:57 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
What shocked me is that even when I was able to gain the attention of actual Google engineers, they did even not seem to understand their algorithm completely
For an organization and a machinery as large and complex as Google and its algorithm, I don't find this surprising at all. Nor, sadly, do I find the slavish devotion to the Almighty Algorithm of the volunteers surprising. For any sufficiently well-known thing, there appears to exist some group of people who will basically worship it as infallible.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 8:59 AM on January 19, 2015
For an organization and a machinery as large and complex as Google and its algorithm, I don't find this surprising at all. Nor, sadly, do I find the slavish devotion to the Almighty Algorithm of the volunteers surprising. For any sufficiently well-known thing, there appears to exist some group of people who will basically worship it as infallible.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 8:59 AM on January 19, 2015
Steely-eyed Missile Man: What shocked me is that even when I was able to gain the attention of actual Google engineers, they did even not seem to understand their algorithm completelyAlso, for an organization as large as Google to change its core algorithm based on complaints from a single user would be capricious.
For an organization and a machinery as large and complex as Google and its algorithm, I don't find this surprising at all. Nor, sadly, do I find the slavish devotion to the Almighty Algorithm of the volunteers surprising. For any sufficiently well-known thing, there appears to exist some group of people who will basically worship it as infallible.
It's worth an error report, at most. It sounds unlikely one was started, but regardless, if I were a librarian I wouldn't change the Dewey Decimal System just because one user thinks one book is on the wrong shelf.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:05 AM on January 19, 2015 [3 favorites]
It's worth an error report, at most. It sounds unlikely one was started, but regardless, if I were a librarian I wouldn't change the Dewey Decimal System just because one user thinks one book is on the wrong shelf.
As far as I know Dewey didn't bury books as part of his system.
posted by srboisvert at 9:10 AM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
As far as I know Dewey didn't bury books as part of his system.
posted by srboisvert at 9:10 AM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
Overnight you see links sink, never to be found again.
posted by infini at 9:16 AM on January 19, 2015
posted by infini at 9:16 AM on January 19, 2015
Algorithms are not sentient beings. They are machines designed and made by people. If they do not work well then they are not to blame. Blame the people who made them.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:19 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 9:19 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Support volunteers on Google's forum (the closest that Google offers to customer service) treated the punishment by the algorithm as a sign from God.
The marriage of Chat Roulette with tech support is perhaps another algorithm gone awry.
What shocked me is that even when I was able to gain the attention of actual Google engineers, they did even not seem to understand their algorithm completely - though they never questioned it (at least not publicly). Google's followers most certainly did not question it - it was a symbol of supreme worthiness.
One can think of the human visual cortex as an algorithm (or set of algorithms) evolved organically over millions of years. Bug reports we've seen filed involve optical illusions like motion in static pictures, invisible gorillas and parlor magic tricks. Much as these Google engineers do not question their own algorithms, it is interesting that we often place so much trust in what we see in front of us. Maybe algorithms cross some magic threshold of utility and are hence treated as infallible systems, odd failures aside.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:39 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
The marriage of Chat Roulette with tech support is perhaps another algorithm gone awry.
What shocked me is that even when I was able to gain the attention of actual Google engineers, they did even not seem to understand their algorithm completely - though they never questioned it (at least not publicly). Google's followers most certainly did not question it - it was a symbol of supreme worthiness.
One can think of the human visual cortex as an algorithm (or set of algorithms) evolved organically over millions of years. Bug reports we've seen filed involve optical illusions like motion in static pictures, invisible gorillas and parlor magic tricks. Much as these Google engineers do not question their own algorithms, it is interesting that we often place so much trust in what we see in front of us. Maybe algorithms cross some magic threshold of utility and are hence treated as infallible systems, odd failures aside.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:39 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Being completely indifferent to and independent of the specific situation and its particulars and their meaning is pretty much what arbitrary means. Algorithms are just logical machinery that through experimentation (testing) are fine tuned to coincidentally yield useful results for particular inputs. They are gears and wheels--arbitrary structures whose utility only comes from their arrangement and a certain statistically predictable correspondence with reality.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:45 AM on January 19, 2015
posted by saulgoodman at 9:45 AM on January 19, 2015
Access to information had long been controlled, and more so in the so called modern era. Contrary to our noises about free exchange of ideas and speech, access to information has been gated by agents of public and private entities.
What's new? Scale? Visibility? It's hard to know something is missing when you can't see it. A link can be an easy beacon when it winks out.
But if anyone thinks this isn't business as usual, they are fooling themselves.
Maybe once upon a time, the algorithm was just personal whim or inscrutable policy. The net result is the same.
Not to mention that we collectively and personally abet, create and contribute to these filters and controls. If you can find the research, you'll find we actively restrict our own access to the research.
We are being lied to, and we are lying to ourselves.
posted by clvrmnky at 10:11 AM on January 19, 2015
What's new? Scale? Visibility? It's hard to know something is missing when you can't see it. A link can be an easy beacon when it winks out.
But if anyone thinks this isn't business as usual, they are fooling themselves.
Maybe once upon a time, the algorithm was just personal whim or inscrutable policy. The net result is the same.
Not to mention that we collectively and personally abet, create and contribute to these filters and controls. If you can find the research, you'll find we actively restrict our own access to the research.
We are being lied to, and we are lying to ourselves.
posted by clvrmnky at 10:11 AM on January 19, 2015
I'm not really convinced that it's useful to conceptualize something as huge and unpredictable Google search as an "algorithm" in the first place (rather than as a "complex system" or a "black box," say). It's made of algorithms, of course, but in terms of its scale and the predictability of its output and the conceptual clarity that at least outsiders can reach about its operation it's arguably more useful to think of it as resembling, say, the weather or traffic than it is to see it as resembling, say, quicksort or Boyer-Moore string search.
That is to say, this is kind of interesting as a stab at a history of folk-ideas about what "algorithm" means, or of rhetoric aimed at explaining (or indeed often at mystifying) algorithms, but it doesn't seem to address the actual nature of the thing under discussion almost at all. Every use of the word "algorithm" doesn't necessarily refer to the same kind of object.
posted by RogerB at 10:29 AM on January 19, 2015 [6 favorites]
That is to say, this is kind of interesting as a stab at a history of folk-ideas about what "algorithm" means, or of rhetoric aimed at explaining (or indeed often at mystifying) algorithms, but it doesn't seem to address the actual nature of the thing under discussion almost at all. Every use of the word "algorithm" doesn't necessarily refer to the same kind of object.
posted by RogerB at 10:29 AM on January 19, 2015 [6 favorites]
RalphSlate: mathowie had a thing or two to say about this situation, as well: https://medium.com/technology-musings/on-the-future-of-metafilter-941d15ec96f0
posted by tippiedog at 11:04 AM on January 19, 2015
posted by tippiedog at 11:04 AM on January 19, 2015
srboisvert: As far as I know Dewey didn't bury books as part of his system.I remain unconvinced that Google intentionally buried Steely-eyed Missile Man's links, as you seem to suggest.
But the DDS certainly does put some books on the hard-to-reach upper, less-well-lit corners of the library... which only after retrieving a stepstool will you discover is moved to the oversized-books section in the next wing. So, the analogy is still apt.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:22 AM on January 19, 2015
Is the ACM just a bunch of academics and me? Professionals have ethical obligations, but sometimes I feel like I'm the only one in the business taking them seriously.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:39 AM on January 19, 2015
posted by ob1quixote at 11:39 AM on January 19, 2015
infini: Overnight you see links sink, never to be found again.We was codin' some end-of-season sale pages and inventory reorder pages from PHP to javascript - just delivered the upgrade, version 2. Eleven hundred pages went into the database. Website went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first Google hit for about half an hour - a Singapore IP address. You know how you know that when you're coding, Chief? You tell by pinging 'em right back as they come in. What we didn't know was our coding mission had been so underfunded, upper management wasn't told. They didn't even hear the website was down for a week. Very first light, some 'bot hits come cruisin'. So we divided ourselves into tight groups. You know, it was kinda like one of the scenes out of that old movie, Hackers. And the idea was, someone detects a bot ping, and he enters that IP address into a blacklist. Sometimes the bot goes away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that bot, he looks right into ya, right into your countermeasures. Y'know, the thing about a bot, he's got lifeless algos, like a genetic algorithm. When he comes after ya, he doesn't care how many million attempts it takes until he's in, and those black 1's and 0's roll over white, and then - aww, then you hear that terrible high-pitch screamin' of the server fans, the server shuts itself off, and in spite of all the blacklistin', they all come in and rip ya to pieces. You know, by the end of that first dawn, we lost a hundred webpages. I don't know how many bots, maybe a thousand. I don't know how many coders just quit. They averaged six an hour. On Thursday morning, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. WOW player. Senior Systems Analyst. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He'd had an aneurism, probably from all the Monster cans and Snickers he'd been living on. Fell over, right onto the linoleum just like a sack of Cool-Ranch Doritos. Well, he... wasn't a pretty sight below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a maintenance supervisor saw us. He was just making rounds and he saw us. He was a young man, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and he reports back to the building manager, who mentions it to the VP Sales, and three hours later, we're all laid off. You know, that was the time I was most frightened - waitin' for my turn to be called in to HR. I'll never work in a cube again. So, eleven hundred website went onto Google, three hundred and sixteen websites come out, and the bots took the rest, January the 9th, 2015. Anyway, we delivered the code.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:41 AM on January 19, 2015 [7 favorites]
I remain unconvinced that Google intentionally buried Steely-eyed Missile Man's links, as you seem to suggest.
I remain unconvinced that Steely-eyed Missile Man implied intentionality at all. Hello, these algorithm fixes completely fucked MetaFilter, did we forget about this? Nobody is saying "change the algorithm to not fuck us over," but any halfway decent algorithm that is effectively curating and indexing the corpus of human information available online should probably have a simple mechanism for "bumping" the rating of something as crazy-useful as MetaFilter without suffering to the almighty algorithm, and perhaps if algorithms "think" THIS SITE is a terrible spam blog, they are in dire use of some fine tuning. But at least a freakin' exception list / override, don't act like the whole damn thing will explode if you let a human being override some of the decisions.
posted by aydeejones at 2:43 PM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
I remain unconvinced that Steely-eyed Missile Man implied intentionality at all. Hello, these algorithm fixes completely fucked MetaFilter, did we forget about this? Nobody is saying "change the algorithm to not fuck us over," but any halfway decent algorithm that is effectively curating and indexing the corpus of human information available online should probably have a simple mechanism for "bumping" the rating of something as crazy-useful as MetaFilter without suffering to the almighty algorithm, and perhaps if algorithms "think" THIS SITE is a terrible spam blog, they are in dire use of some fine tuning. But at least a freakin' exception list / override, don't act like the whole damn thing will explode if you let a human being override some of the decisions.
posted by aydeejones at 2:43 PM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
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posted by Sir Rinse at 6:48 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]