What the figure of the black box conceals is not just the inner workings of algorithms but also the ways in which the unknown can be used strategically as a resource to maintain control or deny liability in certain situations. In suggesting, as I have done, that the black box metaphor constitutes a red herring of sorts, the metaphor itself becomes a strategic unknown, enabling knowledge to be deflected and obscured. What needs to be critically scrutinized, then, is not necessarily the hidden content of the box but the very political and social practices that help sustain the notion of algorithms as black boxes. The question is not simply whether we can know algorithms but when the realm of its intelligibility is made more or less probable. That is, when are algorithms framed as unknowns, for whom and for what purpose?
Three Methodological Tactics
Despite the obvious epistemological limits addressed so far, I want to finish this chapter by ofering three methodological tactics for (un)knowing algorithms. Broadly construed, these tactics correspond to the diferent kinds of ignorance discussed throughout this chapter and focus on tackling the seemingly black-boxed nature of algorithms. These tactics are not meant as an exhaustive list but as a few possible methodological routes that scholars may take when they examine algorithms as objects for cultural analysis.
“REVERSE ENGINEERING” KNOWN UNKNOWNS
Instead of following the Enlightenment impetus seeking to reveal the origin of actions, one way to proceed would be to follow the cybernetic lead. Cybernetics is the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine (Wiener, 1948). It is concerned with understanding the relationship and feedback mechanisms between a system and its environment. As the neuropsychiatrist Ross Ashby put it in An Introduction to Cybernetics, cybernetics is not concerned with what things are but what they do (1999 [1956]: 1). In the book, Ashby dedicated a whole chapter to the problem of the black box, presented as a challenge to the engineer who had “to deduce what he can of its contents” (1999 [1956]: 86). For Ashby, the black box was not necessarily an obstacle but simply part of everyday life. The black box is not an exception but the norm. Lots of things are seemingly hidden and inaccessible—that is, until we find the leaks, cracks, and ruptures that allow us to see into them.
Neither Black nor Box
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