some rando thoughts on algorithms

I have personal and professional investments in physical space. I depend on the nature of its borders and its porosity, its opacity and transparency. But that being said, I’m interesting in the way the authors we read discuss digital space as physical phenomena. Bucher says, in the forth chapter of her book, “Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm is explicitly framed as an architectural form that arranges things (relationships between users and objects) in a ‘right disposition.’” (38) (She mentions this concept earlier, quoting Foucault, claiming, “government is about ‘the right disposition of things.’”) Of course, her use of architecture and arrangement evokes space—the kind made up of feet and inches and oxygen and mid-century modern furniture. And, while I have absolutely no desire to have all space be digital space, I’m curious how seeing digital space as space might help us better understand its “multiplicity.”

Finn mentions the cybernetic ambition to “erase the embodied nature of information through abstraction” and reminds us that information is dependent upon a medium to exist. (30) This “medium” bringing to mind this same physicality but maybe on the level of hardware. I want to think about the “embodied nature of information.” To be clear, not to claim that all embodiment is informational, but to posit information as physical.

Both authors deal with the rhizomatic nature of all space, both digital and physical, the way power exists in the human, but also in the machine. Noble as well is looking to describe an integrated and reciprocal relationship, one of omnipresent prejudice. As Finn states, “implementation runs both ways,” (49) this suggesting a linearity that I don’t believe he meant to imply. He renders this implementation as a gap, another nod to physical space, and claims this gap lies between “computational and cultural constructions of reality,” created by the cultural machine that is in reality us. And I can’t tell if I’m misreading or reading into his claims, but as he continues, his argument feels lost in the computer, or at least in information, triangulating a “a kind of magic” between “the computationalist quest to continually expand the boundary of the effective procedure […] and the human desire for universal knowledge.” (52)

I wonder if we can think of information, and the digital, as spatial or occupying space, of its implementation as spatially constructed, might we develop a different relationship to its “liveness.” As Facebook arranges, it (we might say literally) places things at a distance from us, and of course places others within reach. Our “dispositions” and their arrangements are dependent on our physical positions (attentions and attitudes). When the algorithm abstracts, what happens to the matter faced with abstraction, and is this abstraction actually a throwing away, or even a death. Finn makes the point that “the boundaries of implementation seem endless because they are the boundaries of the material universe.” (48) My issue is that knowledge and cultural construction are (unfortunately?) not my entire material universe. And I wonder if it would be more fruitful to place the computer in our material reality, rather than our material reality in the computer.