人算不如天算
I was asked to make a blog for the NYU IMA Low Res graduate program. (I started with no tangible experience in interaction design.) Math is nature’s poetry, and these are just diary entries.
Alter-Instagram
Reel
I was asked to make a blog for the NYU IMA Low Res graduate program. (I started with no tangible experience in interaction design.) Math is nature’s poetry, and these are just diary entries.
Alter-Instagram
Reel
IMALR-GT-101-02
WHAT: IMALR-GT-101
Why? He must actually care (*gasp*).
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“I don’t know why everyone said algorithms are the reason Trump won the 2016 elections,” Surya said with an almost whimsical expression. “It’s so much more complicated than that. Technology is not bad for society. Society is bad for society.”
I’m not quite sure what caught my attention most about Surya. His Wi-Fi Packet Sniffing portraits? Once desperate need for a boat to hack Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort? Commitment to providing fair access to “high-resolution” data? Or maybe it was just his compassionate smile. Regardless, there he was, frozen still at the intersection between a number and a feeling.
We could talk about Digital Witness Lab, WhatsApp Watch, Blacklight, or even his piece on Machine Bias for ProPublica, but my fascination lies with Surya’s belief in bottom-up societal access to information. With data as his medium, he aims to humanize statistics as a documentarian. This is not the glamorous side of the art x tech world. On the contrary, it’s arguably the least publicly praised. However, it is also the most imperative to recognize.
Problem selection is human. Without equal access to the interpretation of data, we cannot truly know what questions to ask. We will be perpetually bound to valuing the information we know over that we do not. “Bias is not a problem, but rather a feature of society.” We created the technology, and as such, it reflects our collective experience.
Let’s talk about Tufekci for moment. She also believes in the innate integration of the human experience in technology. Twitter and Tear Gas sheds further light on the mirror realities of our physical and virtual worlds. It references themes around Aristotle’s Four Causes and the non-singularity of technological causation. Tufekci reminds us that most of Twitter’s key affordances were first introduced by users before being adopted by the company as regular features. (Guess Trump didn’t win because of a Facebook algorithm.)
The information connectivity philosophies discussed by Surya and Tufekci weave a spiderweb of networked cause + effect that far surpasses the classic, bilateral relationship of tech and society. Though the marriage between these two is an entanglement of wires that we may never uncover the “root” origin of, I sleep better knowing that there are people trying.