All Eyes On the Algorithm

Or, Judas Redivivus

The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters, Francisco Goya (1799)

I have found it challenging to write this past week, overwhelmed by recent events. Since I last wrote, we’ve marked the most dismal Yom HaAtzmaut in Israel’s history (Bibi skipped out on it altogether), the announcement that the International Criminal Court would likely be seeking the arrest of our Prime Minister and Defense Minister; the discovery that Egypt has been playing both sides of this war while feeding and arming Hamas through dozens of tunnels; and the incineration of civilians in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Rafah by an explosion evidently triggered by a targeted IDF strike.

During the same period, I had occasion to read three pieces which made my heart sink. First, a round-up by Benny Morris of Israel’s aimless drift in Gaza; next, a long history by Ronen Bergman in the New York Times Magazine of how the settler movement has systematically undermined the rule of law in Israel over the course of decades — and then took its seat among our legislators; and finally a cri de coeur by Mishael Zion, asking when enough would be enough for a committed Zionist like him (Minister of Defense Itamar Ben Gvir is his answer). 

But I also read a brilliant reflection on the campus encampments by my friend and colleague Doktor Rabbi Zohar Atkins. Dilating on the grotesque, tragic-noxious spectacle of young “progressives” wearing surgical masks and keffiyehs, Atkins remarks: 

We must admit that secularism is no longer what it was. Originally, secularism was born of a religious desire for peace; it was a religious virtue. Now, it is not a choice, but the default. What fills the void left by the death of religion, is not more rationality, but worse religion and more nihilism and cynicism.

Campus protestors make an obsession of Palestinian liberation because they have nothing else to give their lives meaning. It is their rite, a nostalgia for nostalgia. They represent an inevitable pagan turn enabled by the so-called “Death of God.” Religion may be the opiate of the masses, but pseudo-religion in the form of Ivy League Marxism is the fentanyl of the elites.

Atkins helped crystalize for me the way secularism has over the course of the last decade emerged as its opposite. Among the ostensibly godless denizens of those encampments, all the old virtues of secularism — epistemic humility, tolerance, pragmatism — have vanished, and in their place, we find the old ills of faith — zealous attachment to falsehood (“genocide”), Manichean thinking, merciless enforcement of catechisms and orthodoxy, an overweening sense of righteousness, a savage utopianism, and a fervid apocalypticism.

In general, things are feeling pretty medieval around here. Certain foundational features of the modern world are rapidly unraveling, and as they do older forms of thought and belief are reemerging.

I felt the first pulse of this in March 2020, as the pestilence found its way to American shores. In the first days and weeks of Covid, there was an eerie lack of direction about how good, responsible, “science-believing” Americans were meant to conduct themselves. Some said keep the kids out of school; others called this an overreaction. One non-hysterical conservative-leaning friend sent a list of supplies to stock up on, along with instructions about how frequently to Purell our hands. She sounded like she knew what she was talking about, but I couldn’t figure out her sources of information, and she had no science background. 

A week later, a consensus gradually emerged among my peers (affluent, educated liberals) to keep our children home, to stay in doors and to minimize physical contact. And so I followed suit — but unhappily. This is not how we are meant to make decisions. It would be some time until the famous daily Andrew Cuomo press conferences, before we learned about “flattening the curve” and social distancing. For now, key questions about the the nature and behavior of the virus and how we ought to conduct ourselves were answered mimetically, by checking what the neighbors were doing.

I wrote then that that I was experiencing “epistemic vertigo”, the dizzy feeling that not only did I not have any reliable and authoritative sources of information, but didn’t even know what such sources would be. 

More than two months later and a week after the killing of George Floyd, I wrote that my feeling of “vertigo had only grown stronger. My whole social set decided listening to experts and locking down was the decent, responsible and rational thing to do. Anyone dissenting from the first was a pariah, selfish and lacking moral bearings, unconcerned with the lives of the vulnerable and oppressed. I adopted that same posture of moral certainty. And then, suddenly, about a week ago, everything shifted, and now we are all expected to be on the march, and anyone dissenting from that new expectation is a pariah and a racist, unconcerned with the lives of the vulnerable and oppressed.”

“The epistemic destabilization,” I wrote, is far deeper than groupthink: “We've come loose from any consensus account of reality altogether. We have no grounding in what is true, and therefore cannot know what is prudent. The collapse of public trust means we look to one another for cues as to how to behave, and we fall into line very quickly — because we are dangling in mid-air.”

Today, the situation has gotten much, much worse. Four years ago, the video of George Floyd’s killing was shared and re-shared over and over, each time confirming the same story — white supremacy, police brutality — and as it spread it set Minneapolis and then New York and Seattle and then the whole United States on fire. 

But now the Algorithm appears to be fully in control of our flow of information. Videos of atrocities are plentiful, and the Algorithm feeds each of us a customized diet of snuff films. 

The Algorithm, after all, is a kind of Dagobah cave; what’s in there is only what we take with us. And with every gesture, with every tap and every hesitation, we unwittingly cooperate with the Algorithm in creating a world-picture that is tailored, stitch by stitch, to our unconscious.

“What’s in there?” “Only what you take with you.”

Born out of our union with the Algorithm is something altogether more uncanny than is captured in the phrase “confirmation bias.” Together, it appears, we are exhuming and reanimating ways of making sense of the world that had been buried in a shallow grave. Old, lurid stories have been summoned — baroque conspiracies, covens of witches feasting on children, and along with them now the ancient eternal enemy, the Jew, has sprung back to life, ruling the world from Jerusalem, bathing in the blood of children, standing between humanity and the eschaton. Talk about a dialectic of the Enlightenment.

How strange that after the end of ideology, the death of grand narratives, the destabilization and deconstruction of all meaning, amid the rubble of the church and the synagogue, the meanest, most primitive ideas hold sway. Down here in the quad among the disciples of Foucault and Fanon and Derrida and Spivak and Butler, the eschatology of Hamas, gharqad tree and all, encounters no resistance whatsoever. This wasteland concludes not with “shantih, shantih, shantih” but with aameen and alhamdulillah.

This revivification of the medieval is all the more ominous given that alongside it a new intelligence is emerging and evolving at a dizzying clip. Already AI images have become a mainstay of the new pro-Palestine agitprop. But it seems to me that we are living in the last few moments before the next, fateful turn, when the streams will be crossed, the Algorithm flowing into Artificial General Intelligence. Soon the darkest imaginings of the human mind will be harnessed to superhuman abilities.

And what then?