You can download my notes here.
Recommendation algorithms are extremely complex. Even their engineers do not fully understand their inner workings, referring to them as a “black box” that takes in inputs and transforms them into outputs by a not-fully-understood process. Still, we understand some notable and problematic features of these processes, i.e. the proliferation of content that causes outrage and their tendency to lead users towards the alt-right. This essay helped me to think about my own algorithm-writing process as an opportunity for procedural rhetoric- by building a simple and exaggerated version of the real world, I am able to make transparent to my players a system that would otherwise be unintelligible.
