In her recent article "Life in the Algorithm" in
The Yale Review, Anna Shechtman who is an editor-at-large of the Los Angeles Review of Books acerbically argues that there's no such thing as "The Algorithm," yet she says the term has been been widely touted as "the procedure or set of rules that turned teenagers into creators and millionaires into billionaires, solving problems but also generating them." The Klarman Fellow at Cornell University dissects the term in her review of two recent books touting algorithmic thinking, Kyle Chayka's
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture and Taylor Lorenz's
Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power in the Internet.
IMAGE CREDIT: ILLUSTRATION BY PETRA PÉTERFFY"It's said to be quite powerful... something like a meta-specter, really, haunting our hauntings," Anna Shechtman describes algorithmic thinking acerbically. "It’s apparently there, even if you can’t see it, lurking behind incipient fascism, pervasive misogyny, drone warfare, and denialism of all kinds."
Read in full Anna Shechtman's "Life in the Algorithm" in The Yale Review now!
