Being Against the Algorithm

An Existential Approach to the Ideology of Technology

J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway, 1844.

In 2017, long before artificial intelligence came knocking down the doors of every online space—indeed, back when places like Instagram were still cool and fun—writer James Bridle already noticed that in “the age of algorithmic discovery, even if you’re human you have to end up impersonating the machine” if you want to find any success on online algorithmic platforms like Instagram, Youtube, etc.¹ Now that AI is here, Bridle’s observation has become only more relevant now that we can use the machine to help us impersonate the machine.

Everything is so algorithmically driven that we not only “overvalue numbers and undervalue anything soft and difficult to quantify,”² but we have lost our ability to value non-quantifiable qualities at all. Book publishers will insist an author meet a particular threshold of followers on Instagram or Substack before they are considered publishable. Casting decision are made on an actor’s TikTok account metrics. Everything has become data-driven and technical, and the computers are becoming so powerful that we can process huge amounts of data in minutes. Perhaps we will approach a turning point where there will be so much data, and it will be so accessible, that it will essentially become a net-zero, effectively meaningless in its scale and speed. Perhaps, but in the meantime we have to figure out how to respond.

Jacques Derrida, controversial 20th Century philosopher often reduced to merely the “father of postmodernism,” held all technical thinking under suspicion. Anything unambiguous or unconditional left no room or space for the onlooker. Thus, Derrida reasoned, art was much more powerful than technology ever could be.

In this way, Derrida really did usher in a form of postmodernism. The certainty and structure sought by the modernism of the early 20th Century had been swept away by the terror of war. Certainty had got us nowhere good. Thus, Derrida insisted on the equivocal, the ambiguous, and the conditional.³

But this technical thinking appeals to our sensibilities because it offers comfort in trying times. Technical thinking, or technē, is “knowing in the widest sense, to be at home in something.”⁴ This is why we so often try to systematize people’s thoughts, ideas, and writing so that it becomes broadly understandable and less intimidating. (Derrida himself continues to be a victim of this very systematic reduction, ironically. So does Soren Kierkegaard, and this is the subject of my upcoming essay, “Kierkegaard Must Be Read Playfully”). The trouble with the comfort that this systematization brings is that it removes us from the “wider destining of Being,” where we could otherwise Be with a full grasp of our existence and its meaning. When we strip that away in search of graspable truths, we strip away the very fabric that enables the wonder of human existence.

The result is that humans become part of the resource. Technical thinking reduces the entire world to a resource to be used up by humans, but what we fail to see is that we too become that resource.⁵ We feed the machine. This is precisely what Bridle was observing in the quote I opened this essay with: you have to end up impersonating the machine.

Slavoj Žižek noted in A Left That Dares to Speak its Name that the “most dangerous threat to freedom does not come from an openly authoritarian power; it takes place when our unfreedom itself is experienced as freedom.”⁶ Is this not precisely how technology operates in our lives? We are sold on the message that such-and-such technology will “free you up”: having trouble finishing your novel? Here’s a new AI tool that can help. Having trouble writing your songs? Here’s an AI tool that can help. Having trouble forming intimate and meaningful relationships with other people? Here’s an AI tool that can help. And yet when we actually use these tools, we are simply “experiencing our unfreedom as freedom.” We are shackling ourselves to the very machine that reduces us from humans to resources. And the worst part is that we are so very far down this road, and so deeply entrenched in this way of technical thinking that believes these lies, that we are telling this to ourselves! (Also because we want to believe that with the simple help of a tool, I can finally become an author, a musician, a good romantic partner, etc.) This is the insidious nature of this type of lie: it preys upon our own predilections and desires and sneaks in an ideology that actively works against our own flourishing. Zizek notes in Hegel in a Wired Brain that ideology “does not reside primarily in stories invented [by those in power] to deceive others, it resides in stories invented by subjects to deceive themselves.”⁷ Critics can wax poetic about how bad AI is and how it is over-affirmative in its responses. But that’s exactly what people want! This lie is most easily told to the person propagating it.

The result, ironically, is that the more we use AI to think, and the more of our lives we engage in algorithmic thinking, the less we understand our own selves. We cannot access and understand our own essence while thinking technically. The reason for this is obvious: humans are not technical creatures, we are living creatures. And we’re also more than that: we are existent beings staring out at the widening horizon—if only we would look up from our screens! The only way to really think about the role of technology in our lives is to unframe ourselves from the technical thinking we have become engrossed in.

It is becoming increasingly popular to go 24 hours without your smartphone, or even a week, or a month! (The longer the time away, the more clicks you’ll get online when you share the video you made about it.) This is often sold as a way to “get back to yourself,” to your relationships with others, and to “get your brain back,” but there’s something deeper that occurs when you can actually manage to remove these “damn phones” and related technology from your life: you unframe yourself from the ideology of technical thinking. You remove the lens from which you’ve been viewing things and quite quickly realize that things are much different than they appeared. Much of what you spent your time on really didn’t matter. Much of what you ignored really did matter. And if enough of us realized this, perhaps we could actually get somewhere with this.

In this sense (and I will steal from Žižek again, although this time I don’t know exactly where from...), technology’s role in our lives “is not violent enough,” since it follows the grain of the current social order. (Technology is ultimately intimately entwined with our capitalistic structures since Big Tech effectively props up major sections of the global stock markets. In order to really escape from technology’s insidious ideological frame, we would need to dismantle huge swaths of the global economy too...) It may well seem impossible to disentangle ourselves from technology, but there is one fact that causes two problems here: technology tends to self-objectivate. (It’s real! I know it’s real since I use it every day!) But it’s not really real. It doesn’t exist in some place (at least not in the sense we understand that to mean for literally anything else...) This fact both dissuades us from the idea that technology really is just something we can turn off, reduce, and remove while also interfering with our understanding of our own humanity and the self. In other words, the “self-objectivization of today’s science and technology threaten our understanding of humanity, the human being, and self.”⁸

Since an absolute removal of technology from our existence is unlikely (due to the aforementioned entwining with capitalism), we must come up with a means of gauging a technology’s usefulness and its dangers. Žižek formulated it this way, and I think it’s helpful: “The importance [and usefulness] of technology lies in its ability to make us confront our subjectivity, our freedom.”⁹ It appears much of the world is waking up to the fact that technology is “not just machinery” (or its digital equivalent) but is “ a way of thinking, a perspective [that] ... reduces the world to a stockpile of resources for human use, including how humans view themselves.”¹⁰ i.e., if a technology that a human is creating treats other human beings as products, it probably shouldn’t be used by millions of people around the world at every instant of the day.

In this waking up, lots of people are trying to find solutions to the problems that technology has caused in our lives these past two decades. But we have to deframe ourselves first. The judge and profound legal theorist Richard Posner once stated that “one of the causes of bad thinking today is trying to think technically about non-technical problems.”¹¹ Now, he’s not even talking about digital technology, but the point remains: we cannot fight this fire with fire. Modern technology and “its hubris has led to an abyss, an emptiness within the self.”¹² This is an existential problem, and it requires an existential solution, not a technical one. Setting screen time limits, age minimums, and no-screen Sundays is a good start, but it won’t stop the onslaught. “Being” is closely related to nothingness,¹³ the two are constantly in a dance with each other, and so we must take this issue as seriously as we can, for technology leads us into nothingness when we so desperately want to return to simply Being.

1. James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, November 6, 2017, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2.

2. James Clear, Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (New York: Avery, 2018).

3. Peter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (London: Verso, 2020), 3.

4. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964), rev. and expanded ed., trans. William Lovitt and David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2006), 330.

5. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 323.

6. Slavoj Žižek, A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name: 34 Untimely Interventions (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).

7. Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

8. Thomas P. Brockelman, Žižek and Heidegger: The Question Concerning Techno-Capitalism, Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2008), 25.

9. Brockelman, Žižek and Heidegger, 41.

10. Kieran Tranter, “Nomology, Ontology, and Phenomenology of Law and Technology,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 8, no. 2 (2007): 464.

11. Richard A. Posner, Overcoming Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 458.

12. Brockelman, Žižek and Heidegger, 31.

13. Robert Heiss, Hegel Kierkegaard Marx: Three Great Philosophers Whose Ideas Changed the Course of Civilization, trans. E. B. Garside (New York: Dell Publishing, 1975), 199.