Pasquale’s The Black Box Society, Dewandre (2015) instructively connects the recent calls for greater algorithmic transparency to what feminist scholar Susan H. Williams has called the “Enlightenment Vision.” For Williams, “the liberal model of autonomy and the Cartesian model of truth are deeply connected. The autonomous liberal is the Cartesian knower” (2004: 232). According to the Enlightenment Vision, transparency is what makes rationality, autonomy, and control possible. When something is hidden, the Enlightenment impetus says we must reveal it because knowing leads to greater control.1 But what if the power believed to emanate from algorithms is not easily accessible simply because the idea of origins and sources of actions that come with the Cartesian assumption of causality are problematic to begin with? By thinking around the cusp of sensibility and knowledge, I take up in this chapter the challenge of formulating an epistemological stance on algorithms that is commited to the notion of algorithm as multiple introduced in the previous chapter. That is, how to know algorithms when the algorithm is both multiple, “concealed behind a veil of a code,” and seemingly “impenetrable”?
In this chapter, I use the concept of the black box as a heuristic device to discuss the nature of algorithms in contemporary media platforms and how we, as scholars and social actors interested in them, might atend to algorithms despite, or even because of, their seemingly secret nature. Moving beyond the notion that algorithms are black boxes, this chapter asks, instead, what is at stake in framing algorithms in this way and what such a framing might possibly distract us from asking. The questions that I want to pose in going forward have to do with the limits of using the black box as a functional analogy to algorithms. To what extent are algorithms usefully considered as black boxes? What could we possibly see if eforts to illuminate algorithms are not directed as the source code or details of its encoded instructions but elsewhere, and what would this elsewhere be? The chapter unfolds as follows: First, I address the trope of algorithms as black boxes, arguing that algorithms are neither as black nor as boxed as they are sometimes made out to be. Next, I unpack this claim more by conceptualizing algorithms in terms of a relational ontology. This implies a shift in focus from the question of what algorithms are to what they do. The argument is made that, in order to address the power and politics of algorithms, questions concerning the agency of algorithms should be focused not on where agency is located but when. Finally, I point to three methodological tactics around which to orient ways of making sense of algorithms.
Black Box
THE PROBLEMATIC OF THE UNKNOWN
The concept of the black box has become a catch-all for all the things we (seemingly) cannot know. Referring to an opaque technical device about which only the inputs and outputs are known, the figure of the black box is linked to the history of secrecy—to trade secrets, state secrets, and military secrets (Galison, 2004: 231).2 The black box is an object whose inner functioning cannot be known—at least not by observation, since the blackness of the box obscures vision. Historically, the black box refers, quite literally, to a physical black box that contained war machinery and radar equipment during World War II. In tracing the genealogy of the black box, von Hilgers (2011) describes how the black box initially referred to a “black” box that had been sent from the British to the Americans as part of the so-called Tizard Mission, which sought technical assistance for the development of new technologies for the war efort. This black box, which was sent to the radiation lab at MIT, contained another black box, the Magnetron. During wartime, crucial technologies had to be made opaque in case they fell into enemy hands. Conversely, if confronted with an enemy’s black box, one would have to assume that the box might contain a self-destruct device, making it dangerous to open. As a consequence, what emerged was a culture of secrecy or what Galison (1994) has termed “radar philosophy,” a model of thought that paved the way for the emergence of cybernetics and the analysis and design of complex “man-machine” systems. The black box readily became a metaphor for the secret, hidden, and unknown. In everyday parlance, everything from the brain to markets to nation-states is now conceptualized as a black box. Algorithms are no diferent.
42
IF . . . THEN