Algorithms have been on my mind lately and I’ve been thinking how they may be used as tools of oppression. If they are indeed tools of oppression, how can we fight against them? I think Simon de Beauvoir may have some insight.
Algorithms are ubiquitous and it’s often hard to avoid them. They are tools used to optimize something, although this something can vary. Traffic lights, for example, need an optimal time of green lights, yellow lights, and red lights to ensure that traffic flows smoothly as possible that often vary throughout the day. Often times we distill information about streets and estimate traffic flow and use algorithms that optimize traffic flow to avoid traffic jams (or sometimes fail because y’know, CA infrastructure sucks).
Algorithms aren’t only used to optimize traffic light duration, they’re present when we decide for social media. Whenever you open Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube, the platform needs to decide what kind of content it wants to show you. The question is, what content should this be? Although it would be nice to imagine a squirrel picking what you see on social media, the amount of squirrels required would be too much. We also don’t have enough nuts and acorns to compensate the squirrels with (sorry squirrels!)
Instead, algorithms have been designed to make this decision. When making this decision, algorithms make this decision to on the basis that it is optimizing something, which has been chosen by a person. I’d argue that whatever is optimize reflects the values of what Simone de Beauvoir calls, the serious world. These social media algorithms often want to optimize the amount of viewership for a content and implicit in this choice is to pick something that appeals to the majority of people. When you see that cat video, it’s because the algorithms makes a gamble and thinks you will watch the cute cat do silly things because it has deemed that the video that will appeal to the mass majority–and it indeed it does!
The designer of these values, however, do so on the basis of trying to maximize viewership and profit. These software engineers choose values that maximize viewership and thus ideals that agree with the serious world. As we absorb content of social media, we are implicitly taking in these serious values and biases. Algorithms reinforce a serious world in which they try to project onto us and deny our freedom.
And I don’t mean freedom in the “I am free if I am physically free sense.” I mean freedom in the sense of Being oneself, as de Beauvoir puts it. As she says, “to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future”
Algorithms, with their handpicked values of a human designer, thus can limit our current situation by giving an illusion of values already made and a sense of security, similar that of the “trick of ‘enlightened’ capitalism,” making people forget their concerns and have their transcendence Peter out.
If we accept this to be true, then what can we do to liberate ourselves?
As de Beauvoir puts it, freedom only “wills itself genuinely only by willing itself as an indefinite movement through the freedom of others.” We may do it through freeing others. But how can we do this through social media?
Algorithms have an input: it is us. We can choose the content we watch and it will decide what the values of the serious world are. It begins with choosing what content we take in and the algorithms will slowly adjust content we watch.
“But I’m only one person out of so many! How can this change anything?”
Change starts small. And through this small change, we provide a possibilities that others will see is a possibility they an do, to free others. It is only through the freedom of others that we may realize the freedom, and the Being, of ourselves.
