The Sorcerer Algorithm

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The blue eye is two meters tall. Placed at the exact height of the face of someone waiting for a train. Below it says Let the Algorithm decide for you.

— Corporate blue. The blue of things that cost money.

— Why are you looking at it?

— Because it’s two meters tall. Impossible not to.

— Look around. No one’s looking at it.

The station speakers announce the next train, platform three, but report the service is delayed. They clarify, however, that the system needs no central sorcerer1. That capture works on its own, no strings, no puppeteer. A network of practices and fears that holds together the way the train schedule holds together: because no one remembers when it started.

I get on. Everyone with their phone, dodging the person ahead without looking up.

— No one lifts their head.

— Neither do you.

— I’m observing.

— That’s what everyone looking at their phone says.

From the speakers, a voice reminds passengers that a parrot repeats patterns from a data jungle so vast that its echo resembles a consciousness2. Please do not confuse the echo with the bird3.

I walk through the car. A woman with three bags takes up two seats; no one says anything. I sit on the sunny side.

I take out my phone. My thumb heads for Twitter.

— Stop.

— Why?

— Because you already know what happens. Twenty minutes and then you can’t remember a thing.

— I know. I know every time. But not this time. This time I put the phone down and I watch the faces of the people not looking at a screen. There are three of them: an older woman with a book, a kid drawing in a notebook, and a man in a uniform staring into space.

— A small act of disobedience.

— Does it do any good?

— It’s a reminder that the thumb has no will of its own.

— In a book, you choose the rhythm. This is a train. The rhythm chooses you.

— What’s the difference?

The woman across the aisle, a girl no older than twenty, looks at her phone with those white, wired earbuds that are almost a uniform. On the screen, the same video I saw last night of a guy cutting colorful bars of soap into cubes. Visual ASMR. The girl doesn’t smile, just watches, with the same concentration as someone reading a biopsy result.

— Coincidence.

— Coincidences don’t exist when there’s a recommendation system.

— Then what is it?

— A pattern. Someone like you watches the same things as someone like her.

— “Someone like you.” What does it know about me?

— Everything you gave it. Which is almost everything.

— I didn’t give it anything.

— You gave it every second your thumb lingered on an image. Every search at three in the morning. Every link you hesitated over and didn’t tap.

— That’s not giving. That’s being watched4. It becomes an abstract force, like destiny or gravity.

— In fact, my grandmother says “the Algorithm” with the same face she uses for “inflation.” Something that comes from above.

— My grandmother doesn’t know what it is.

— No one does. It’s not that we don’t understand it yet: it’s that it won’t let itself be understood5.

Suddenly, the biopsy girl laughs. A short, inward laugh. Her jaw tenses again instantly.

— The worst part isn’t being watched. It’s that they put a video in front of you and you laugh.

A guy walks through with a trash bag full of earbuds. The script is always the same, chanted with the weariness of a thousand trips: ‘Headphones, great sound, power bank for your phone…’. No one looks up. He doesn’t look at anyone either; he’s talking to a car of bowed heads. A human algorithm, repeating its pattern. The repetition reminds me of another.

— This morning I asked a machine to fix a text for me.

— And?

— I fed it raw ideas and out came a sausage of prose. The Artificial Sausage Maker.

— But you used it.

— There were sentences better than mine. I used them.

— So it works.

— And now I don’t know if what’s left is mine or a corrected version of me6.

— What’s the difference?

— First it was the spell checker. Then the translator. Then “improve the writing.”

— There’s no day when you said “today I’ll let it think for me.” It’s slower than that.

— The worst part isn’t the doubt.

— What’s the worst part?

— How fast I stopped asking which part was mine.

Someone gets on wearing a gray hoodie that betrays a developer conference; a cryptic logo on the chest. Sits down, takes out their phone, like everyone else.

— That one knows how it works.

— They know their part. No one knows the rest.

— What’s the rest?

— Somewhere, someone looks at photos of the worst we do, one by one, so the machine learns not to show them to you7.

— The Cloud is not a cloud.

— It’s an open-pit mine8. But when it answers you, you don’t see those hands. You see something that thinks. Something that advises you, writes you love poems and termination letters9.

— I say thank you to the machine.

— What about the people who classify the images?

A sharp screech of metal on metal, and the car shudders to a halt. Outside: the wet platform, the loose tiles, a dog tied to a column. It watches the still car with the patience of…

— No. That sentence isn’t yours.

— What do you mean?

— “The patience of something that no longer expects anything.” The Sausage Maker would write that.

— I thought of it myself.

— Are you sure? Because it sounds good and says nothing.

— What if I think like the Sausage Maker?

— That’s the question.

— The dog is wet. It’s tied up. Someone throws it a piece of croissant.

— That’s enough.

— Without the sentence it’s just a dog.

— A dog is enough.

— But I can’t think without the sentence10.

The train starts. My thumb is still there.

— Did I think this or did you suggest it?

— Does it matter?

— If it doesn’t matter, they’ve already won. If it starts to matter, the game is still on.

Outside, the city keeps running with the efficiency of something that doesn’t need anyone to understand it.

Addendum: Echoes

—Sorcery? Seriously?

—It’s not a metaphor. It’s a diagnosis. Stengers isn’t talking about black candles, she’s talking about paralysis. About capture.11

—Capture?

—A fridge that plugs itself in. The system gives you two doors, and both lead to the same hallway.12 Use the machine or become irrelevant. Give up your data or you don’t exist.13 It’s a trap that works on its own. No sorcerer. That’s why it’s so good.

—But someone made it. Someone knows how it works.

—They know how to start it up. Like someone who knows the formula for compost to ferment. But they don’t understand the end result. One of their own engineers called it alchemy.14 Others, stochastic parrots.15

—A parrot that works.

—It works, yes. The way an open-pit mine works.16 It extracts value from everything you’ve given it. Your conversations, your fears, the pictures of your kids. And to make it look clean, to hide the filth, there are people on the other side of the world looking at the worst of us for two dollars an hour.17 Fetishism with a chat interface.18

—But denunciation is not enough. Knowing doesn’t change anything.

—Knowing is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Denunciation is a literary genre that soothes the one who denounces and leaves the system intact.19 Stengers and Pignarre propose something else. To cast a circle. Like real witches used to do.

—What for?

—To protect yourself. To admit that you’re affected. To create a space where you can think differently. To pay attention. In an economy that thrives on your distraction, paying attention is a political act.

—Doesn’t sound like much.

—That’s because there’s no red button to turn it all off. It’s slower than that. It’s about starting to tell another story. One where technology isn’t a spear to conquer the future, but a bag to carry things in. And to always ask, who benefits from the acceleration?

—My sister says I’ll get left behind.

—Your sister is afraid. Fear is the engine. But resistance is not a battle, it’s an act of imagination. It’s inventing futures that are not in the data.20 It is, simply, to start walking instead of waiting for the next train.

Sources and Rabbit Holes

Readings that surrounded this text. Not all are cited above; some simply stayed open in tabs I never closed.