Algorithm and Blues…

Can the soul be measured? How many Angels can sit on the head of a pin? Are we Ghosts in the Machine and does the machine care about us?

Hmmmmm. Lots to contemplate in this age of automated reason, deductive assumptions and blind egalitarian taste tests based on the click of a mouse..

Seems we live at a time when how we measure up, compare and deduce-you-say, is a quantitative and often, stoic examination of our human natures by some soulless analyzing set of numbers known as Algorithms (No, Al Gore did not invent them) .

Algorithms are the driving pulse of technology and their complete description can get a tad heavy, so suffice to say, that for the purpose of this essay: they suck.

Our choices are now our surface identity to the world, that world being one of a sorid data driven system of weights and measures. A system that has seemingly empowered the oblique, heightened the obvious and seeks to do away with human, emotional and visceral dynamics in favor of what the Nerds have sought all along...a level playing field.

Still, I believe the system, whose heart beats in an algorithmic cadence, is flawed and will ultimately fade.

Seemingly simple, the algorithm based analysis which can now follow you from gas pump to corner store, from highway to bed room and boardroom alike; from what you watch on TV to what you post or plunder on the internet, to when you dim your lights or how you name your kids, is evil and venial.

Here are ten reasons why.

1. The lack of response or the glut of response to any given Data, measured in a yes-no world is empty, transitory and just plain stupid. There are many shades of “like”, a person likes something for most likely (I know) the very opposite reason that the Algorithm thinks, (please think...I know) even when that algorithm is programmed to weed out or analyze such factors as repeated clicks, organic preferences and the IP address of the clicker which holds a great deal of ethnic, social and cultural information. All of which borders on Virtual Profiling and an assumptive collectivism that is not only dangerous, but so wrong.

2. Any given person’s choices are not so black and white... and if they were, they were never truly scrutinized properly in the first place, for the millions of people online or texting or charging stuff by simply walking through a wired portal, are human, frail, judgmental, triumphant and scared. Can any algorithm sense a impulse, a nagging child in the check out line, what the buyer did in 1995? The argument they had with their spouse or boss that day? How they feel about rainy summer evenings, the tone of their voice when they remember their parents, the timber of their dreams?

3. This knee jerk, auto corrected world of transparency is an illusion... one that draws our society deeper and deeper into a self-satisfied abyss. Words are more vital from a human being using them properly than by a well oiled machine's blind analysis; trust and honesty are not forged in the furnace of ersatz fair-play and electronic even-handed political correctness. Peace and satisfaction coughed up by the fear of what a simple, seemingly egalitarian technology spits back and forth, is false or tepid at best. A Soul is seared by mistakes and redeemed, not by a technology that takes the responsibility for conscionable comportment and probity off our shoulders but by actual corporal and spiritual interaction that leads to healing.

4. Teflon Dons of Data...Duplicity still reigns and thrives in a world that the people who created these platforms wallow in. Messrs. Gates and Zuckerberg, hold their own privacy sacred, while they exploit and profit from yours. Notable CEO’s and Plaudits and Pundits alike have someone else doing their social media, their Avatars traverse these platforms in a cold and calculating manor, assured that nothing, no dicey response or awkward repose can reach them nor anything negative traced back to them.

5. It's a sterile, codified and quantum leaped universe of 1’s and 0’s. We have forgotten the space between them digits, the thought that lies deep within the huge canyon of silence it must cross; wherein the decision gains it impetus, its motivation, its soul-searching and bears the fruit of a fleeting finality...

6. ...for decisions, like any freely made decision can be reversed, enhanced or simply ignored.

7. Why someone chooses something or what causation played a role in that choice is not considered in this either/or world. In fact the murky territory comes in the role of the observer, the tech-savvy programmer who can only bring his own history, fears and predilections into the agreement made with his analysis of the virtual reality set before him: “Let’s see, most people I have interacted with since High School, who liked the color orange and used Oligarch in a sentence were assholes…” noted, annotated codified and condensed!

8. ...this snowballs into a roiling boil of misconstrued informational representation which is furthered enhanced by the fact that if the agreement ever reaches the human eyes of another rung of observer it has been presented and layered over in a myriad of interlaced Data that is both assumptive and misleading. Anyone who has experienced facebook or Youtube’s ads lining your interface or running before your video for some product or service that seems slightly incongruous to both your desires and privacy know what I am talking about.

9. Are you truly a part of a lump sum? Listen, do you really liked being lumped into a Candidate for Crestor because you commented on a blog about Governor Christie’s obvious bulk? Or, held to a standard of youth or beauty, age or wisdom because of the choices of what you bought on Amazon or Ebay? Is your Viral Footprint truly indicative of what you can contribute to your life and the lives of others? Where is Charlie Chaplain or Woody Allen or Fritz Lang or HAL or Her the computer to let us know that…

10. ... humanity's seeming singularity is an amalgamation of past experience, cultural influences and the desire to question and cajole a higher power and one’s self. Not to be mired in a tangled unconscionable web that is quickly replacing the sacred with the banal, boring and the common place. Just because it clicks and pops and spins and plays games with you, does not make it your friend. Its an unfeeling, unflinching bully, it is an Algorithm.