Felix Stalder, moderator of the All Watched Over by Algorithms conference on Big Data, opened with a poem from countercultural novelist Richard Brautigan titled "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". No doubt because of its 1967 publication date, Brautigan's poem is occasionally identified as a prophecy of the 21st century's wired, algorithmic age. But, unless readers are well-acquainted with the author's deadpan satirical style, which he simultaneously infused with humor and melancholy, the poem's meaning can be lost or misinterpreted.

Stalder assumes that Brautigan, being a literary figure of the '60s "hippie" counterculture, dreamed machines would bring a return to nature—a "cybernetic ecology", as he called it. But the author who was said to be contempuous of hippies was probably no technology enthusiast either. Indeed, he wrote "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" while Poet-in-Residence at the California Insitute of Technology, where he wrote another poem entitled "At the California Institute of Technology," which reads:

I don't care how God-damn smart
these guys are: I'm bored.
It's been raining like hell all day long
and there's nothing to do.

No one can know but Brautigan if he actually hoped for a cybernetic ecology where robots would free up humans, bringing a sublime return to nature. Brautigan, who wrote everything from the violent and humorous to the surreal and fantastical, also wrote a great novel called "In Watermelon Sugar", which takes place on a commune in some future post-apocalyptic world, where it seems humans have finally been done in by their technology. The point of mentioning the novel is to create a counterpoint to Stalder's reading of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", which was inspired but for the wrong reason. It seems likely that Brautigan held little hope for a peaceful blending of biological and artificial intelligence, but taking the piss out of those who did. And so he might have agreed with panelists Matteo Pasquinelli, Antoinette Rouvroy, and Evgeny Morozov, none of whom see a peaceful, cybernetic ecology blooming in the era of Big Data. 

Pasquinelli began by mentioning algorithms carry out two big tasks tasks: pattern recognition and anomaly detection. The latter is produced by the former, and all of it is performed for corporate and political purposes. Google's algorithms search for patterns in consumer purchases, for instance, while the state searches for threats in anomalies of its citizenry's social media patterns. But, Pasquinelli argues that algorithmic search for anomalies actually causes new patterns to emerge, confusing matters by producing apophenia, the condition of seeing patterns and connections in meaningless data. To counter this, algorithms must become tools for resistance, though he didn't lay out a course for how this should unfold. 

The next panelist to speak, Rouvroy, looked at algorithms and big data through the lens of philosophers like Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze. For that reason, her speech is best experienced on video (which is soon to be published). While Rouvroy cycled through many ideas during her alotted time, she wrapped up by saying that when algorithms profile humans, they reduce humans to animals; because, like animals that cannot respond to humanity's profiling efforts, humans cannot respond to being "indistinctly" profiled by algorithms. Ultimately, she said, "Brautigan's dream didn't happen because of [this] indistinction of the data—algorithms do not make distinctions". 

Morozov was less academic. For him, Big Data is an expression of political economy, which he said must be opposed. Corporations own data centers, so he called for users to reclaim them because "the ideology of big data is the ideology of contemporary capitalism". But, Morozov doesn't think openness and transparency will reclaim our data, nor will "small level" actions by hackers, artists, writers and intellectuals. He believes that it involves winning elections and "capturing central banks". Morozov also had a go at the America's '60s counterculture, which helped birth personal computing and the Internet. This counterculture, Morozov said, was built on shaky foundations because it was promoted through consumption—namely, the Whole Earth Catalog, which sold products in addition to ideas, inspiring the likes of Steve Jobs. 

All in all it was a spirited hour and a half on the subject of algorithms. And though the panelists disagreed on a few particulars, they were united on the larger point that the era of Big Data is a mess. And Richard Brautigan? If he'd been a panelist, maybe he'd have recited the line, "I don't care how God-damn smart these guys are: I'm bored." Then again, he'd probably be off trout fishing in America.

For the full flavor of the "All Watched Over by Algorithms" conference, be sure to watch the video soon. 

Photos by Katharina Träg