NEW DARK AGE [day 3]
DCI 271
Prof. Mackenzie Brooks
May 1, 2025
Icebreaker
“We have been conditioned to believe that computers render the world clearer and more efficient, that they reduce complexity and facilitate better solutions to the problems that beset us, and that they expand our agency to address an ever-widening domain of experience. But what if this is not true at all? A close reading of computer history reveals an ever-increasing opacity allied to a concentration of power, and the retreat of that power into ever more narrow domains of experience.”
-pg 34
“By conflating approximation with simulation, the high priests of computational thinking replace the world with flawed models of itself; and in doing so, as the modellers, they assume control of the world.”
-pg 35
Your turn:
Code/space
“Code/spaces describe the interweaving of computation with the built environment and daily experience to a very specific extent: rather than merely overlaying and augmenting them, computation becomes a crucial component of them, such that the environment and the experience of it actually ceases to function in the absence of code.” -pg 37
Coded Objects
Machine-readable objects that need code/software to function
Coded infrastructure
“both networks that link coded objects together and infrastructures that are monitored and regulated, fully or in part, by software.” (Kitchen 6)
Coded processes
“the transactions and flows of digital capta across coded infrastructure” (Kitchen 6)
Coded assemblages
“where several different coded infrastructures converge, working together— in nested systems or in parallel, some using coded processes and others not— and become integral to one another over time in producing particular environments” (Kitchen 7)
Your turn:
“Reading a book, listening to music, researching and learning: these and many other activities are increasingly governed by algorithmic logics and policed by opaque and hidden computational processes. Culture is itself a code/space…
Computation actually becomes culture.” pg 39
Your turn:
What do you know/do that’s not mediated by code?
Automation bias
Leads to cognitive bias that “see automated responses as inherently more trustworthy than nonautomated ones.” (Bridle 40)
But also, decision fatigue!
= laziness?
Where/when does computational thinking fail/limit us?
Break!
Research!!!!!!
Your turn: pick a professor
How does research work?
How do we do/find research?
Pick a name/topic Try a database
Can you:
Can you find:
Break!
Assignment work
For Tuesday: