relations in two paragraph
TEXTS
Your essay must cite and analyze passages from the following readings:
Foer,Franklin.MarkZuckerbergsWaronFreeWill.WorldWithoutMind:TheExistentialThreatofBig Tech. Penguin, 2017, pp. 102-115.
Tolentino, Jia. Always Be Optimizing. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, 2019, pp. 63-94.
PROMPT
Both Franklin Foers Mark Zuckerbergs War on Free Will (2017) and Jia Tolentinos Always Be Optimizing (2019) examine the ways in which humans are, consciously or unconsciously, giving up an important aspect of their autonomy. Foers nuanced condemnation of the automation of reason, (109) which he correlates with the ascendance of big tech, echoes Tolentinos earlier reflection that [t]echnology, in fact, has made us less than oppositional…we have deployed technology not only to meet the demands of the system but to actually expand these demands (93). Together, these texts invite us to consider the role and value and, indeed, even the viability of individuality and human resistance to powerful economic and ideological systems in the modern age.
Citing textual evidence from both Foer and Tolentinos texts to support your analysis, compose an original essay in response to the following question:
How and to what degree is the engineering mind-set creating conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation to the demands of tech companies such as Facebook and other paternalistic corporations? (Foer 107; Tolentino 68; Foer 106). How does mechanical thinking pose a danger to human well-being, and why? (Foer 109).
THOUGHT-PROVOKERS
Below are some further questions that may be useful to consider in generating your argument. Remember that you only need to address the above prompt in bold:
Whatistheengineeringmindset,(Foer107)andwheredowefinditalsoimpliedinTolentinos exploration of modern day life? How do the authors seem to be defining modern day life? Why is the engineering mindset problematic in terms of human freedom, human creativity, even human empathy?
Foer discusses Facebooks strong, paternalistic view (106). What is that view? How is this paternalism connected to the patriarchy that Tolentino writes about? What is the connection between the engineering mindset and paternalism?
Foers last sentenceWe are the screws and rivets in the grand design (114) echoes the problem Tolentino grapples with throughout Always Be Optimizing. What is Foer implying in these words? Both authors seem to suggest an alternative to the dehumanizing effects of modern day life. What are these alternatives, and why are they necessary?
FORMAT
You must proofread carefully.
Quotations should be carefully transcribed, punctuated, and attributed. Use MLA bibliographic conventions, and please follow the conventions of standard edited American English. Use 1.0-inch margins on all sides, double- spacing, and twelve-point Times New Roman font. Number all pages. Your paper should have a proper heading and must be submitted through Canvas as a Word document. Always Be Optimizing
The ideal woman has always been generic. I bet you can picture
the version of her that runs the show today. She’s of indetermi
nate age but resolutely youthful presentation. She’s got glossy
hair and the clean, shameless expression of a person who believes
she was made to be looked at. She is often luxuriating when you
see her-on remote beaches, under stars in the desert, across a
carefully styled table, surrounded by beautiful possessions or
photogenic friends. Showcasing herself at leisure is either the
bulk of her work or an essential part of it; in this, she is not so
unusual-for many people today, especially for women, packag
ing and broadcasting your image is a readily monetizable skill.
She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or husband:
he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience,
reaffirming her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object,
a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached.
Can you see this woman yet? She looks like an Instagram
which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the
marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an
ideal. The process requires maximal obedience on the part of the
woman in question, and-ideally-her genuine enthusiasm, too.
This woman is sincerely interested in whatever the market de-
94 TRICK MIRROR:
around the world who take them feel awful. We have not “opti
mized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representa
tion; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas,
let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized
our capacity as market assets. That’s all.
For the way out, I think, we have to follow the cyborg. We have
to be willing to be disloyal, to undermine. The cyborg is powerful
because she grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because
she accepts without question how deeply it is embedded in her.
“The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment,”
Haraway wrote. “We can be responsible for machines.” The dream
of the cyborg is “not of a common language, but of a powerful
infidel heteroglossia”-a form of speech contained inside another
person’s language, one whose purpose is to – introduce conflict
from within.
It’s possible if we want it. But what do we want? What would
you want-what desires, what forms of insubordination, would
you be able to ac<;:ess-if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal
woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system
that magnifies and dimiishes you every day? , ...
FRANKLIN FOER
FRANKLIN FOER (RHYMES WITH "LORE") is a writer long associated with the liberal
magazine the New Republic, which was founded in 1914 by leaders of the Pro-
gressive movement. Impatient with the mainstream media, which these leaders
saw as controlled by moneyed interests, they were hoping to create an indepen-
dent journal of ideas. Since then, the New Republic has seen its ups and downs,
but the near-collapse of the magazine during Foer's second stint as editor exposes
the stubborn persistence of the problem it was founded to address: the survival of
independent media in a highly unequal society like ours. In 1914, the elite owed
their towering wealth to railroads, coal mines and oil wells; today they control
the Internet and the "attention economy."
Foer was a casualty and not the cause of the magazine's decline. After a term
as editor, he left to pursue other projects when he was lured back to the editor's
post by Chris Hughes, then a boyish 28-year-old lucky enough to have shared a
room with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg when the two were students at
Harvard. As part of the original Facebook team, Hughes later sold his interest in
the platform for an amount purportedly in excess of700 million dollars. And that
enormous wealth encouraged him to think that he could reshape the nation's
cultural life in the ways he thought best. One of his first moves was to buy the
New Republic, a respected but financially strapped print magazine.
At first, the New Republic's journalists welcomed Hughes as a white knight
who had arrived in the nick of time to save them from the problems created by
the shift away from print to the Internet. They interpreted the return of Foer as a
sign of Hughes' commitment to serious, hard-hitting analysis. But gradually the
writers at the magazine realized that their owner had something else in mind, as
Sarah Ellison reports in Vanity Fair, another mass-market periodical:
Over time, one of the big :flash points that developed between Hughes
and his New Republic writers was their productivity. What that some-
times meant-despite Hughes's stated contempt for "superficial metrics
of online virality"-was productivity measured in Web traffic .... The
site's traffic did indeed double, but never got beyond that. "It was not
just about traffic," another former staffer told me. "It was. really about
[Hughes] kind of feeling, 'These writers are taking my money, and
they're coasting. They're sitting around in their office, intellectually
masturbating, while I'm paying them."'
"Mark Zuckerberg's War on Free Will" from A WORLD WITHOUT MIND: THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF
BIG TECH by Franklin Foer, copyright 2017 by Franklin Foer. Used by permission of Pengwn Books, Ltd.
102
FRANKLIN FOER 103
In the editorial offices of the New Republic, the older culture of ideas collided with
the new culture of information. If ideas are measured by their quality, iriformation
can be quantified in metrics like "visits," "page views," and "downloads." Deter-
mined to increase the :flow of traffic to the New Republic's online site, Hughes
eventually fired Foer, whose exit inspired two thitds the staff to resign in protest.
Just prior to Hughes' purchase of the magazine, sales had more than doubled,
but on his watch, newsstand sales declined by 57% in 2013 and by another 20%
in 2014. Today, the magazine limps along, a shadow of its former sel Hughes
abandoned it in 20i6, after deciding to devote his energies to venture capital.
Franklin Foer continues to write for some of the best magazines in the coun-
try, most recently the Atlantic. His latest book, World Without Mind: The Existential
Threat ef Big Tech (2017) tries to come to terms with dangers presented by the
cultural clash that all but destroyed his magazine, and, quite possibly, many others
in the years to come.
REFERENCES
Sarah Ellison, "The Complex Power Coupledom of Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge."
Vanity Fair July 2014. https:/ /www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/chris-hughes-
sean-eldridge-new-republic-congress-run
Katerina Eva Matsa and Michael Barthal, "The New Republic and the State of Niche
News Magazines." Pew Research Center. FACTANK: News in the Numbers.
10 December 2014. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank:/2014/12/10/the-new-
republic-and-the.,.state-of-niche-news-magazines/
Mark Zuckerberg's War
on Free Will
Silicon valley graduated from the counterculture, but not really. All the values it
professes are the values of the sixties. The big tech companies present themselves
as platforms- for personal liberation, just as Stewart Brand preached. Everyone
has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfill their intellectual and
democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where television had been
a passive medium that rendered citizens inert, Facebook is participatory and
empowering. It allows users to read widely, think for themselves, and form their
own opinions.
We can't entirely dismiss this rhetoric. There are parts of the world, even
in the United States, where Facebook emboldens citizens and enables them to
organize themselves in opposition to power. But we shouldn't accept Facebook's
self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down
system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation,
104 FRANKLIN FOER
but that's a surface trail. In reality, Face book is a tangle of rules and procedures
for sorting .information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit
of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them,
using them as lab rats in its behavioral experiments. Wbile it creates the impres-
sion that it offers choice, Facebook patemalistically nudges users in the direction
it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that thoroughly
addicts them. It's a phoniness most obvious in the compressed, historic career of
Facebook's mastermind.
Mark Zuckerberg is a good boy, but he wanted to be bad, or maybe just a little bit
naughty. The heroes of his adolescence were the original hackers. Let's be precise
about the term. His idols weren't malevolent data thieves or cyber-terrorists. In the
parlance of hacker culture, such ill-willed outlaws are known as crackers. Zuck-
erberg never put crackers on a pedestal Still, his hacker heroes were disrespectful
of authority. They were technically virtuosic, infinitely resourceful nerd cowboys,
unbound by conventional thinking. In MIT's labs, during the sixties and seven-
ties, they broke any rule that interfered with building the stuff of early computing,
such marvels as the .first video games and word processors. With their free time,
they played epic pranks, which happened to draw further attention to their own
cleverness-installing a living, breathing cow on the roof of a Cambridge dorm;
launching a weather balloon, which miraculously emerged from beneath the turf,
emblazoned with "MIT," in the middle of a Harvard-Yale football game.
The hackers' archenemies were the bureaucrats who ran universities, corpo-
rations, and governments. Bureaucrats talked about making the world more effi-
cient, just like the hackers. But they were really small-minded paper-pushers who
fiercely guarded the .information they held, even when that .information yearned
to be shared. When hackers clearly engineered better ways of doing things--a box
that enabled free long-distance calls, an instruction that might improve an operat-
ing system-the bureaucrats stood in their way, wagging an unbending finger. The
hackers took aesthetic and comic pleasure if!- outwitting the men in suits.
When Zuckerberg arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2002, the heyday of the
hackers had long passed. They were older guys now, the stuff of good tales, some
stuck in twilight struggles against The Man. But Zuckerberg wanted to hack, too,
and with that old-time indifference to norms. In high school-using the nom
de hack Zuck Fader-he picked the lock that prevented outsiders from fiddling
with AOL's code and added his own improvements to its instant messaging
program. As a college sophomore he hatched a site called Facemash-with the
high-minded purpose of determining the hottest kid on campus. Zuckerberg
asked users to compare images of two students and then determine the better
looking of the two. The winner of each pairing advanced to the next round of his
hormonal tournament. To cobble this site together, Zuckerberg needed photos.
He purloined those from the servers of the various Harvard houses that stockpiled
them. "One thing is certain;' he wrote on a blog as he put the finishing touches
on his creation, "and it's that I'm a jerk for making this site. Oh well."
His brief experimentation with rebellion ended with his apologizing to a
Harvard disciplinary panel, as well as campus women's groups, and mulling strategies
MARK ZUCKERBERG'S WAR ON FREE WILL 105
to redeem his soiled reputation. In the years since, he's shown that defiance really
wasn't his natural inclination. His distrust of authority was such that he sought out
Don Graham, then the venerable chairman of the Washington Post company, as
bis mentor. After he started Facebook, he shadowed various giants of corporate
America so that he could study their managerial styles up close. Though he hasn't
fu]ly shed his awkward ways, he has sufficiently overcome his introversion to appear
at fancy dinner parties, Charlie Rose interviews, and vanity Fair cover shoots.
Still, the juvenile fascination with hackers never did die, or rather he carried
it forward into his.new, more mature incarnation. When he finally had a corpo-
rate campus of his own, he procured a vanity address for it: One Hacker Way. He
designed a plaza with h-a-c-k inlaid into the concrete. In the center of his office
park, he created an open meeting space called Hacker Square. This is, of course,
the venue where his employees join for all-night Hackathons.As he told a group
of would-be entrepreneurs, "We've got this whole ethos that we want to build a
hacker culture."
Plenty of companies have similarly appropriated hacker culture--hackers are
the ur-disrupters-but none have gone as far as Facebook. Of course, that's not
without risks. "Hacking" is a loaded term, and a potentially alienating one, at
least to shareholders who crave sensible rule-abiding leadership. But by the time
Zuckerberg began extolling the virtues of hacking, he'd stripped the name of most
of its original meaning and distilled it into a managerial philosophy that contains
barely a hint of rebelliousness. It might even be the opposite of rebelliousness.
Hackers, he told one interviewer, were 'Just this group of computer scientists who
were trying to quickly prototype and see what was possible. That's what I try to
encourage our engineers to do here:' To hack is to be a good worker, a responsible
Facebook citizen--a microcosm of the way in which the company has taken the
language of radical individualism and deployed it in the service of conformism.
Zuckerberg claimed to have distilled that hacker spirit into a motivational
motto: "Move Fast and Break Things." Indeed, Facebook has excelled at that.
The truth is, Facebook moved faster than Zuckerberg could ever have imagined.
He hadn't really intended his creation. His company was, as we all know, a dorm
room lark, a thing he ginned up in a Red Bull-induced fit of sleeplessness.As his
creation grew, it needed to justify its new scale to its investors, to its users, to the
world. It needed to grow up fast.According to Dustin Moskovitz, who cofounded
the company with Zuckerberg at Harvard, "It was always very important for our
brand to get away from the image of frivolity it had, especially in Silicon Valley!'
Over the span of its short life, the company has caromed from self-description
to self-description. It has called itself a tool, a utility, and a platform. It has talked
about openness and connectedness. And in all these attempts at defining itself, it
has managed to clarify its intentions.
Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency of govern-
ments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the transparency of
individuals-or what it has called, at various moments, "radical transparency" or
"ultimate transparency." The theory holds that the sunshine of sharing our intimate
details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives. Even if we don't intend for our
secrets to become public knowledge, their exposure will improve society.With the
106 FRANKLIN FOER
looming threat that our embarrassing information will be broadcast, we'll behave
better. And perhaps the ubiquity of incriminating photos and damning revela-
tions will prod us to become more tolerant of one another's sins. Besides, there's
virtue in living our lives truthfully. "The days of you having a different image for
your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably
coming to an end pretty quickly," Zuckerberg has said. "Having two identities for
yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."
The point is that Facebook has a strong, paternalistic view on what's best
for you, and it's trying to transport you there. "'To get people to this point where
there's more openness-that's a big challenge. But I think we'll do it," Zucker-
berg has said. He has reason to believe that he will achieve that goal. With its size,
Facebook has amassed outsized powers.These powers are so great that Zuckerberg
doesn't bother denying that fact. "In~ lot of ways Facebook is more like a govern-
ment than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and
more than other technology companies we're really setting policies!'
Without knowing it, Zuckerberg is the heir to a long political tradition. Over
the last two hundred years, the West has been unable to shake an abiding fantasy;
a dream sequence in which we throw out the bum politicians and replace them
with engineers-rule by slide rule. The French were the first to entertain this
notion in the bloody, world-churning aftermath of their revolution. A coterie of
the country's most influential philosophers (notably, Henri de Saint-Simon and
Auguste Comte) were genuinely torn about the course of the country. They hated
all the old ancient bastions of parasitic power-the feudal lords, the priests, and the
warriors-but they also feared the chaos of the mob. To split the difference, they
proposed a form of technocracy-engineers and assorted technicians would rule
with beneficent disinterestedness.Engineers would strip the old order ofits power,
while governing in the spirit of science. They would impose rationality and order.
This dream has captivated intellectuals ever since, especially Americans. The
great sociologist Thorstein Veblen was obsessed with installing engineers in
power and, in 1921, wrote a book making his case. His vision briefly became a
reality. In the aftermath of World War I, American elites were aghast at all the
irrational impulses unleashed by that conflict-the xenophobia, the racism, the
urge to lynch and riot. What's more, the realities of economic life had grown
so complicated, how could politicians possibly manage them? Americans of all
persuasions began yearning for the salvific ascendance of the most famous engineer
of his time: Herbert Hoover. During the war, Hoover had organized a system that
managed to feed starving Europe, despite the seeming impossibility of that assign-
ment. In 1920, Franklin Roosevelt-who would, of course, ultimately vanquish
him from politics-organized a movement to draft Hoover for the presidency.
The Hoover experiment, in the end, hardly realized the happy fantasies about
the Engineer King. A very different version of this dream, however, has come to
fruition, in the form of the CEOs of the big tech companies. We're not ruled by
engineers, not yet, but they have become the dominant force in American life,
the highest, most influential tier of our elite. Marc Andreessen coined a famous
MARK ZUCKERBERG'$ WAR ON FREE WILL 107
aphorism that holds, "Software is eating the world." There's a bit of obfuscation in
that formula-it's really the authors of software who are eating the world.
There's another way to describe this historical progression. Automation has
'come in waves. During the Industrial Revolution, machinery replaced manual
workers. At first machines required human operators. Over time, machines came
to function with hardly any human intervention. For centuries, engineers auto-
mated physical labor; our new engineering elite has automated thought. They
have perfected technologies that take over intellectual processes, that render the
brain redundant. O:r; as Marissa Mayer once argued, "You have to make words less
human and more a piece of the machine." Indeed, we have begun to outsource our
intellectual work to companies that suggest what we should learn, the topics we
should consider, and the items we ought to buy. These companies can justify their
incursions into our lives with the very arguments that Saint-Simon and Comte
articulated: They are supplying us with efficiency; they are imposing order on
human life.
Nobody better articulates the modern faith in engineering's power to trans-
form society than Zuckerberg. He told a group of software developers, "You know,
I'm an engineer, and I think a key part of the engineering mindset is this hope and
this belief that you can take any system that's out there and make it much, much
better than it is today. Anything, whether it's hardware, or software, a company, a
developer ecosystem, you can take anything and make it much, much better." The
world will improve, if only Zuckerberg's reason can prevail--and it will.
1HE PRECISE SOURCE OF FACEBOOK's power is algorithms. That's a concept repeated
dutifully in nearly every story about the tech giants, yet it remains fuzzy at best to
users of those sites. From the moment of the algorithm's invention, it was possible
to see its power, its revolutionary potential. The algorithm was developed in order
to automate thinking, to remove difficult decisions from the hands of humans, to
settle contentious debates. To understand the essence of the algorithm-and its
utopian pretension-it's necessary to travel back to its birthplace, the brain of one
of history's unimpeachable geniuses, Gottfried Leibniz.
Fifty years younger than Descartes, Leibniz grew up in the same world of
religious conflict. His native Germany; Martin Luther's homeland, had become
one of history's most horrific abattoirs, the contested territory at the center of
the Thirty Years War. Although the battlefield made its own contribution to the
corpse count, the aftermath of war was terrible, too. Dysentery, typhus, and plague
conquered the German principalities. Famine and demographic collapse followed
battle, some four million deaths in total.The worst-clobbered of the German states
lost more than half of their population.
Leibniz was born as Europe negotiated the Peace ofWestphalia ending the
slaughter, so it was inevitable that he trained his prodigious intellectual energies
on reconciling Protestants and Catholics, crafting schemes to unify humanity.
Prodigious is perhaps an inadequate term to describe Leibniz's mental reserves.
He produced schemes at, more or less, the rate he contracted his diaphragm.
His archives, which still haven't been fully published, contain some two hundred
thousand pages of his writing, filled with spectacular creations. Leibniz invented
108 FRANKLIN FOER
calculus-to be sure,he hadn't realized that Newton discovered the subject earlier,
but it's his notation that we still use. He produced lasting treatises on metaphysics and
theology; he drew up designs for watches and ,vindmills, he advocated universal
health care and the development of submarines.As a diplomat in Paris, he pressed
Louis XIV to invade Egypt, a bank-shot ploy to divert Germany's mighty neighbor
into an overseas adventure that might lessen the prospect of marching its armies
east. Denis Diderot, no slouch, moaned, "When one compares ... one's own small
talents with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go
die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner."
Of all Leibniz's schemes, the dearest was a new lexicon he called the universal
characteristic-and it, too, sprang from his desire for peace. Throughout history;
fanciful thinkers have created languages from scratch in the hope that their con-
coctions would smooth communication between the peoples of the world, fos-
tering the preconditions for global oneness. Leibniz created his language for that
reason, too, but he also had higher hopes: He argued that a new set of symbols and
expressions would lead science and philosophy to new truths, to a new age of rea-
son, to a deeper appreciation of the universe's elegance and harmony, to the divine.
What he imagined was an alphabet of human thought. It was an idea that
he first pondered as a young student, the basis for his doctoral dissertation at
Altdorf. Over the years, he fleshed out a detailed plan for realizing his fantasy.
A group of scholars would create an encyclopedia containing the fundamental,
incontestably true concepts of the world, of physics, philosophy, geometry, ev-
erything really. He called these core concepts "primitives," and they would in-
clude things like the earth, the color red, and God. Each of the primitives would
be assigned a numerical value, which allowed them to be combined to create
new concepts or to express complex extant ones. And those numerical values
would form the basis for a new calculus of thought, what he called the calculus
ratiocinator.
Leibniz illustrated his scheme with an example. What is a human? A rational
animal, of course. That's an insight that we can write like this:
rational x animal = man
But Leibniz translated this expression into an even more mathematical sentence.
"Animal," he suggested, might be represented with the number two; "rational"
with the number three. Therefore:
2 x3 6
Thought had been turned into math-and this allowed for a new, foolproof
method for adjudicating questions of truth. Leibniz asked, for instance, are all men
monkeys? Well, he knew the number assigned to monkeys, ten. If ten can't be
divided by six, and six can't be divided by ten, then we know:There's no element
of monkey in man-and no element of man in monkey.
That was the point of his language: Knowledge, all knowledge, could ulti-
mately be derived from computation. It would be an effortless process, cogitatio
MARK ZUCKERBERG'S WAR ON FREE WILL 109
caeca or blind thought. Humans were no longer even needed to conceive new
ideas. A machine could do that, by combining and dividing concepts. In fact,
Leibniz built a prototype of such a machine, a gorgeous, intricate compilation
of polished brass and steel, gears and dials. He called it the Stepped Reckoner.
Leibniz spent a personal fortune building it. With a turn of the crank in one
direction the Stepped Reckoner could multiply, in the other direction divide.
Leibniz had designed a user interface so meticulous that Steve Jobs would have
bowed down before it. Sadly, whenever he tested the machine for an audience, as
he did before the Royal Society in London in 1673, it failed.The resilient Leibniz
forgave himself these humiliating demonstrations. The importance of the universal
characteristic demanded that he press forward. "Once this has been done, if ever
further controversies should arise, there should be no more reason for disputes
between two philosophers than between two calculators:' Intellectual and moral
argument could be settled with the disagreeing parties declaring, "Let's calculate!"
There would be no need for wars, let alone theological controversy, because truth
would be placed on the terra fuma of math.
Leibniz was a prophet of the digital age, though his pregnant ideas sat in the
waiting room for centuries. He proposed a numeric system that used only zeros
and ones, the very system of binary on which computing rests. He explained
how automation or white-collar jobs would enhance productivity. But his critical
insight was mechanical thinking, the automation of reason, the very thing that
makes the Internet so miraculous, and the power of the tech companies so
potentially menacing.
Those procedures that enable mechanical thinking came to have a name. They
were dubbed algorithms. The essence of the algorithm is entirely uncomplicated.
The textbooks compare them to re<:mes--a series of precise steps that can be
followed mindlessly.This is different from equations, which have one correct result.
Algorithms merely capture the process for solving a problem and say nothing
about where those steps ultimately lead.
These recipes are the crucial building blocks of software. Programmers can't
simply order a computer to, say, search the Internet. They must give the computer
a set of specific instructions for accomplishing that task. These instructions must
take the messy human activity oflooking for information and transpose that into
an orderly process that can be expressed in code. First do this ... then do that ....
The process. of translation, from concept to procedure to code, is inherently reduc-
tive. Complex processes must be subdivided into a series of binary choices. There's
no equation to suggest a dress to wear, but an algorithm could easily be written
for that-it will work its way through a series of either/ or questions (morning or
night, winter or summer, sun or rain), with each choice pushing to the next.-
Mechanical thinking was exactly what Alan Turing first imagined as he col-
lapsed on his run through the meadows of Cambridge in 1935 and daydreamed
about a fantastical new calculating machine. For the first decades of computing, the
term "algorithm" wasn't much mentioned. But as computer science departments
began sprouting across campuses in the sixties, the term acquired a new cachet. Its
vogue was the product of status anxiety. Programmers, especially in the academy,
110 FRANKLIN FOER
were anxious to show that they weren't mere technicians. They began to describe
their work as algorithmic, in part because it tied them to one of the greatest of all
mathematicians-the Persian polymath MUQ.ammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, or
as he was known in Latin, Algoritmi. During the twelfth century, translations of
al-Khwarizmi introduced Arabic numerals to the West; his treatises pioneered
algebra and trigonometry.By describing the algorithm as the fundamental element
of programming, the computer scientists were attaching themselves to a grand
his
