Wire(d) mommy, or Algorithms of Authority

Decisions are laundered in environments engineered to offer up available choices.

Children in strollers holding iPhones correctly and interfacing intelligently with kid-oriented imagery and animation.

In a short aside within Lewis Mumford's writing he witnessed a quiet, little death in having city children, with no access to the country or wilderness, playing amid trees whose selection, nurturing, placement, and maintenance were the result of city park administration decision making. To him, that kind of encounter is much like the one footnoted by Stanley Deetz in bemoaning (coyly) the fact that his son encounters strategies to avoid lawsuits in the design artifacts of the playground where he plays. A blogger asides that nomadic humans were probably smarter than modern humans given the lack of structure to their daily lives and the constant requirement to invent, improvise, and survive under harsher environmental conditions amidst deadly animals.

Where are we now?

Sadly, large swathes of our society wait in line, over night sometimes, to spend perhaps a month or better's wages on their own personal Skinner Box, the new i-(me, mine) phone. This device becomes their constant interactive companion and, resonant with our above-mentioned blogger, divests them of any need for memory or imagination. No, that phone, that portable information and communication device offers both for them. When a phone owns your memory it owns your behavior as well. Yes, it allows them to interact with people, but no, it disallows a kind of unfettered or unstructured play between people in the face-to-face on the grass sense of the term. Instead, it offers up structured interaction with benefits. The 'game' of communication or simply of interaction within these structured communication formats have participants participating for looks, thumbs up, likes, and other micro-rewards. The popular user-generated website Reddit provides one such example of a now-recurring motif within computer mediated communities: a popularity economy. In Reddits, posters and viewers get to vote  up or down posts by other users. Likewise, 'Redditors' carry a rank called karma, which reflects the 'quality' of their contribution to the Reddit community, which is a reflection of their posts' ranking.

What is behind all of this? A combination of user activity and algorithms. But where does one end and the other begin? Do the algorithms aid users in finding useful information? Yes. Do the algorithms enhance user experience? Yes. Does Redditor karma influence Redditor participation? I don't know, but they do post a searchable leaderboard.

Remember those standalone arcade games that would preview game play then flash the title screen and finally the top three or ten player scores? The "King of Kong" offers a fitting portrait of just how motivated some can be to play to the highest score. Game environments such as the one offered by the 'Donkey Kong' circuitry are the playground of OCDs. Sports in general and baseball in particular has spun off its own math and statistics devotees. Whole departments of organizations participate in fantasy sports pools where they select a team of players and advance their team based upon the abstracted play statistics of those players. Tabletop gaming runs on random number generation, which substantiates both luck and chance in the dramatic decision to roll the dice and offers a transparent view into game mechanics, which dramatizes fairness. After all, when the player decides to roll and the subsequent numbers that fall facing up determine the outcome of a gameplay decision they issued from that players decision to roll and that player's hand.

Math is fair, oh so fair. Infinity runs in both directions, and it scales infinitely between the discrete numbers around which we organize activity. Bell curves reflect 'actual' populations. Traffic light cameras employ simple algorithms to substantiate traffic offenses in the pictures of it taking place, which are mailed to the offender with a return envelope with instructions on how to pay the fine issued. Algorithms determine what, how, and where to plant crops. Computers monitor houses, mimic activity, and lock doors remotely.

Once these machines and their mathematical language could reliably use and solve problems with the mathematical language they were given we at least had machines for running decision algorithms. The computers, these mules, could perhaps alleviate humanity of some of the monotony of tasks. But we do have to ask why we built an environment for use on the basis of filtering out negative conditions, which must be done in a systematic, patterned, monotonously reconstructed and maintained way.

Do we have to weave baskets into perfect mathematical expressions of length, distance, tightness? Why must we submit a person to a lifetime of weaving a 'Persian' rug that is so dense, so 'information rich' simply to produce a very remarkable and striking pattern in a functional floor covering? Why, when we have so many technical feats under our belts, do we continue to enslave great numbers of society to debt-penury and force them to work it off over time? Haiti, if our history provides us with an explanation, declared itself the first free country founded by slaves. Their first order of business was to pay back the debt that they represented as property to the French crown. Africans were born free, captured into slavery, and sold abroad while their captors were goaded into this process by an addictive substance known as tobacco to which they had become so enamored. Slave ships would bring them their tobacco in exchange for bound bodies.