Nowadays, there is an
app for that, one is told quite frequently. Indeed, it seems that
nowadays there is an app for everything. Apps that organize our lives,
help us watch our diet and weight, find potential partners in our
neighbourhood, inform us about traffic conditions and suggest better
routes, help us choose a restaurant or a holiday destination and so on.
At some stage in the life of the computer, in a leap of compression,
applications became apps, and the world changed.
An app is something like those attachments
we get along with a mixie- an ingenious device that adds on a specific
capability to the mother machine, without altering its basic function in
any way. An app points the machine in a given direction, converting it
from a bundle of generic technological ability into a carrier of a
specific intent. Apps fit into our lives more precisely, and offer
outcomes that allow us to do something more or a little better. The
question changes from ‘What can it do’ to ‘What do you need from it’,
and technology usually wrapped up in its own narcissistic
self-referenced world unbends to serve more specific and often menial
purposes. The loftiness that is implicit in the idea of technology is
domesticated; apps use technology as one would a pet rather than as a
deity.
In doing so, the device itself
increasingly becomes a docking station for many utilities that drive its
use. The machine increasingly recedes from prominence and becomes a
site for some generic capabilities – the purpose-specific machine gives
way to one that allows itself to be led by the intention of the user.
The mobile phone is the best illustration of a general-purpose machine
that combines an ability to receive sensory input with information
processing and data and voice transmission that allows it to become an
ideal breeding ground for a host of apps that penetrate into many
corners of our lives.
If apps help fit technology into the lives
of the users, algorithms, the other significant addition to our
technologically-enhanced lexicon, increasingly use information about the
user and the manner of use to impart to the machine an air of
knowingness. Algorithms allegedly figure things out, by looking at data
and making unspecified leaps of correlations and neural connections.
Corporations increasingly rely on these worms of certainty as they
burrow their way into the innards of data, and spew out predictions.
Unlike the app, which operates at the surface, the algorithm is the
mystic hum of the universe, a product of the alchemy of facts. By
unearthing some deep pattern across many variables, related or
otherwise, algorithms lay claim to a level of understanding that
unravels the complexity of many phenomena.
At one level, algorithms can sound a
little bit astrological in the way in which they combine unverifiability
with certitude. If the ads that pop up on social media sites allegedly
at the behest of some algorithm are any indication, this is a science
that needs some work. Given that in most cases, no knowledge actually
surfaces- it is produced and consumed in the use itself- the power of
algorithms often needs to be accepted as an article of faith. For those
who have struggled with rudimentary attempts at fitting multivariate
real life data into a pattern with any degree of robustness, the idea
that some magical but invisible mathematical formulation holds a master
key to predicting human beings down to their smallest unit of behavior
is hard to swallow.
But these objections might well be rooted
in assumptions that may no longer be valid. Unlike the physical world
where our actions go largely unrecorded and therefore unaccounted for,
in the digital world, our footsteps are always cast in cement. And
today, virtually everything significant in our lives carries a digital
signature- work, family and friends, romance, entertainment. Every
action registers, and some divine bookkeeper, going under the name of
Google or Facebook is keeping track of our behavior. This is
unprecedented, for historically no individual has merited such close
individual scrutiny of her trivial everyday behavior. There has never
been the need or the ability to record individual behavior in such
atomized detail. What we call Big Data is the divine re-arranging of
human action into knowledge about human intent. Every microbit of
behavior becomes data- existence becomes pixels of data that get
reconstituted into some form of usable knowledge. And crude as some
pattern recognition attempts might be, algorithms have the advantage of
being able to learn continuously by iteratively refining their
understanding. We have just embarked on this journey- data keeps getting
added, and nothing will get erased.
As technology develops the ability to
sense the world, and discern the underlying patterns that propel our
beliefs and actions by following what we do and relentlessly try and
make sense of it, it allows us to become both users and the used.
Technology allows our desires to become reality more seamlessly, even as
the act of making that happen further refines how we might be
understood better by the algorithms that track us.
Perhaps this is how the individual is
understood best- not as the seat of some primal motivations but as a
series of clicks, likes and uploads. We give ourselves by our search
history, and someone is always taking notes, and adding things up in
some divine spreadsheet. The answers that technology currently produces
might not be particularly accurate but it is the intent that is clear.
The more we want the world to be customized to fulfill our desires, the
more control we need to cede over our own selves. The world is on to us,
and there is no escaping the self.
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