The lunacy of the captive gaze of algo(l)rithmic content
1st December 2023
The cycles of information online these days seem to be continuously speeding up. From a helter-skelter level of clownery diving down a TikTok fun slide to a current news doom drop, a wormhole opens and it’s suddenly a few hours later from picking up your phone. Social media is overrun by the daily news cycle, and fast-moving trends. These swirling information vortexes are often reshared with an attached emotional reaction. The way social media dominates the flow of information through digital space feels overwhelming. It provides so much content for our singular human bodies to absorb and process.
The internet has a reputation amongst astrologers as being lunar. The moon is the fastest moving planet spending 2.5 days in each sign. It receives and reflects rays of light from other celestial bodies. She also has her joy in the 3rd house, a place of community and information sharing. The moon being the closest celestial body to earth is strongly associated with the physical body and no wonder this lunar online space has an impact on our physical bodies too.
The enticing scroll time has become a kind of self-regulation tool. Whether that’s regulating your body to a constant state of gleeful entertainment, chronic stress, or bouncing back and forth between. The content we consume has become increasingly condensed into short video clips or digestible infographics. With this our body has to contend with sped up cycles of interior processing and regulation from consuming more and more content in a small period of time. The more content there is, the more our attention can be monetized. Our emotional reactions become a resource to be extracted by data companies. Attention has been declared as the new hot commodity and the intermittent hold social media has on us is a kind of lunacy.
To be clear, I am not using the term lunacy to express a diagnosed psychiatric condition of insanity which has a historical context of oppression. I want to define lunacy as the way in which our attention is taken away from self-determination and our bodily nervous state is aligned to information vectors through a captive gaze.
The fundamental mechanism of astrology relies on gaze. Perhaps that’s why astrology is having a resurgence in popularity now in a period where visibility is so strongly valued. But what I find insidious about the flaws of social media is the captivation of its content. This makes me think of Algol. The fixed star Algol, the most evil star in the sky, is known as the demon star. It represents the eye of Medusa’s severed head in the Perseus constellation.
What’s funny is that Algol sounds a lot like algorithm. This is a seemingly a correlational coincidence as the word algorithm actually comes from the Persian mathematician Al-Kwarizmi whose name was mistakenly translated into algoritmi when it was latinized. Interestingly Al-Kwarizmi was a scholar at the house of wisdom where astrology was studied. Yet in the modern day, Algol also stands for Algorithmic Language as it was coined for Algol 60, allegedly the first algorithmic programming language used for computer software in 1958. ALGOL is almost a myth itself, as it is no longer in use today but deemed parent of programming language as it gave rise to a number of coding languages.
Even if coincidence, the myth of Medusa can tell a story about digital culture. The myth is ultimately about an imbalance of power, Medusa was cursed by an all-powerful God, then slain by a demi-god who was aided with extra powers by the Gods. It is implied her beauty influenced the wrath of Athena that led to her curse of monstrosity and petrification by stare. Algorithms function on the basis of showing people content they want to see in order to capture their attention. This has resulted in a highly aestheticized media culture, as well as one that centres around extremes. The visceral horror of Medusa’s face can reflect an unfiltered access to perception of atrocities occurring in the world. The capturing of attention through beauty, or tragedy leads to our petrification.
The slaying of Medusa was meant to be an impossible task for Perseus until the gods aided him with supernatural/magic items. Today data monitoring uses algorithms to create a profile on likes, dislikes, pride, insecurities, cravings and the extent of our identity we share online. The algorithmically produced content turns our phones into mirrors that reflect all these things back to us petrifying us in fixation. A reflection of a magic shield was used to slay Medusa and perhaps she is taking revenge to petrify all of us through our own mirrors.
The addendum of one version of the myth is perhaps the most reflective of the newly emerging algorithmic intelligence. When Medusa was slayed her gorgon sisters cried out in despair. Athena heard this despair and was so enraptured she fashioned a flute to mimic the cries. However, when she played, she saw her own reflection in the water become ugly. Algorithmic intelligence functions through a mimicry of learnt patterns. These often result in unconscious bias rising to the surface. For example, such AI programs used by police to identify suspects ended up being racially biased as it could only detect white faces accurately due to the way the developers programmed the software. The ugliness of human prejudice is reflected through algorithmic intelligence.
This ugliness of the algorithmic impact pervades further into interior lives. It’s not just our attention that is the new commodity, a redirection of intention is the byproduct. The hold on our attention directs our awareness away from the ability to assert our will. Something key to note is that Medusa is depicted with little agency in the myths. The stories revolve around things that happen to her. Her iconic petrifying gaze is typically shown as instant in pop cultural reference, and therefore it is unclear if even she has control over it herself. When we open up our phones the algorithmic content entrances us and we forget to be present in our bodies. Without presence it becomes harder to manifest our intent. Forget dystopian visions of AI, algorithmic content already holds us complacent.