Algorithmic Silence: A Call to Decomputerize

Abstract

Tech critics become technocrats when they overlook the daunting administrative density of a digital-first society. The author implores critics to reject structural dependencies on digital tools rather than naturalize their integration through critique and reform. At stake is the degree to which citizens must defer to unelected experts to navigate such density. Democracy dies in the darkness of sysadmin. The argument and a candidate solution proceed as follows. Since entropy is intrinsic to all physical systems, including digital systems, perfect automation is a fiction. Concealing this fiction, however, are five historical forces usually treated in isolation: ghost work, technical debt, intellectual debt, the labor of algorithmic critique, and various types of participatory labor. The author connects these topics to emphasize the systemic impositions of digital decision tools, which compound entangled genealogies of oppression and temporal attrition. In search of a harmonious balance between the use of "AI" tools and the non-digital decision systems they are meant to supplant, the author draws inspiration from an unexpected source: musical notation. Just as musical notes require silence to be operative, the author positions algorithmic silence-the deliberate exclusion of highly abstract digital decision systems from human decision-making environments-as a strategic corrective to the fiction of total automation. Facial recognition bans and the Right to Disconnect are recent examples of algorithmic silence as an active trend.

Untitled

“…Instead of obeying mediatic regimes that broadcast their solemn moral dictates under auspices of, for example, "the science says," a schizorevolutionary raises questions and conducts research, arriving at their own considered viewpoints on matters that bear directly on their life, their livelihood, and their communities. Instead of launching reactive attacks on the IoT infrastructure, a schizorevolutionary appeals to more constructive calls, such as the call issued by Penn [58] "to reject structural dependencies on digital tools" via strategies of "algorithmic silence" and "decomputerization." Instead of allowing themselves to be slotted into either-or schemaseither avail oneself to exploitation and afford survival or be deprived of a means of income and lose access to all subsistence-supporting systems, for example the schizorevolutionary creates ad hoc alternatives: or we will reject and protest these options while organizing mutual-aid networks with likeminded peers; or we will build our own newly invented democratic institutions and modes of democratic self-organization from the grassroots; or, adapting Mbembe's most recent reflections on the matter [54], we will enact a new generation of inalienable human rights based upon the abolition of all forms of social apartheid currently being engineered by an anti-democratic ensemble of necropolitical war machines; or…or…or….…”

Politics by Automatic Means? A Critique of Artificial Intelligence Ethics at Work

“…So, there is no room to discuss one of the central questions with AI-whether or not it should actually be built in the first place. Or should a problem which can be fixed with AI, actually be fixed with AI, or should it perhaps not be fixed at all (Penn, 2021).…”