Filterworld

INTRODUCTION: WELCOME TO FILTERWORLD
The Mechanical Turk

In 1769, a civil servant in the Habsburg Empire named Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen built a device nicknamed “the Mechanical Turk.” It was a gift created to impress the Habsburg empress, Maria Theresa of Austria. Von Kempelen’s nigh-magical machine could play and win a game of chess against a human opponent simply by means of internal clockwork gears and belts. As seen in historical etchings, the Mechanical Turk was a large wooden cabinet, about four feet wide, two-and-a-half feet deep, and three feet tall, with doors exposing the elaborate machinery inside. On top sat a humanoid automaton the size of a child, dressed in a robe and turban and sporting a dramatic mustache, leaning over a chess board. (The Orientalist archetype seen from the European perspective conflated the foreign-human and the foreign-machine in an era of booming international trade.) The Turk’s left arm hovered over the chess board, grasped pieces, and moved them. The machine chimed when a move was made, detected when the other player cheated, and made different facial expressions. So befuddling was von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk that it traveled internationally, matching up with the likes of Benjamin Franklin in 1783 and Napoleon Bonaparte in 1809. They both lost.

What the Mechanical Turk could not actually do, however, was play chess. There was no artificial intelligence driving the machine, no set of gears that mechanically determined its next move. Instead, a short-statured human pilot curled himself inside the cabinet. He was a chess expert who could observe the game by means of magnet-connected markers underneath the board that corresponded to the pieces on top—the locations of the pawn, the knight, the king as the game was played. The pilot maneuvered the automaton’s hand by means of levers and strings to grab the pieces and move them, moving the magnets in turn. Smoke from a candle-lamp, which the pilot used for illumination to work the machine, leaked out of hidden holes in the back. All the internal clockwork was just for show; it didn’t do anything. If the audience wanted to peek inside, the pilot could slide back and forth on a mobile seat to hide as the cabinet’s doors were opened in a false demonstration of transparency, something like a false bottom in a magic-show prop.

The Mechanical Turk offered the impressive illusion of a machine that could make decisions for itself, that seemed to be smarter than a human, though a human ultimately controlled it. Some viewers suspected that it was fake. “To call it an automaton is an imposition, and merits a public detection,” wrote the skeptical British eccentric Philip Thicknesse in a 1784 book, arguing that the machine was controlled “by invisible confederates.” Thicknesse continued, “The Automaton Chess-Player is a man within a man; for whatever his outward form be composed of, he bears a living soul within.” Thicknesse was correct, of course, but the secret was not fully revealed until 1860, at which point the machine had toured the United States and landed in the collection of Edgar Allen Poe’s personal physician, John Kearsley Mitchell. The original artifact was destroyed in a fire, and Mitchell’s son wrote a tell-all for The Chess Monthly. That the machine was a blatant illusion only increased the Mechanical Turk’s significance, however.

Over the two centuries since its invention, the device has become a prevalent metaphor for technological manipulation. It represents the human lurking behind the facade of seemingly advanced technology as well as the ability of such devices to deceive us about the way they work. (In 2005, Amazon named its service for accomplishing digital tasks, like tagging photos or cleaning data, using an invisible marketplace of outsourced human labor “Mechanical Turk.”) The Mechanical Turk is like The Wizard of Oz’s man behind the curtain—an all-knowing, uncanny entity that is ultimately revealed as something much more mundane and comprehensible. The machine and the trick reinforce each other. Through its doubled deceptions, the Turk’s achievement, as Walter Benjamin wrote reflecting on the device in a 1940 essay, is to “win all the time.”

I think about the Mechanical Turk quite often, lately, because it reminds me of the technological specter haunting our own era of the early 21st century. That specter goes by the name of “the algorithm.” “Algorithm” is usually shorthand for “algorithmic recommendations,” the digital mechanisms that absorb piles of user data, push it through a set of equations, and spit out a result deemed most relevant to preset goals. Algorithms dictate the websites we find in Google Search results; the stories we see on our Facebook feeds; the songs that Spotify plays in never-ending streams; the people we see as potential matches on dating apps; the movies recommended by the Netflix homepage; the personalized feed of videos presented by TikTok; the order of posts on Twitter and Instagram; the folders our emails are automatically sorted into; and the ads that follow us around the internet. Algorithmic recommendations shape the vast majority of our experiences in digital spaces by considering our previous actions and selecting the pieces of content that will most suit our patterns of behavior. They are supposed to interpret and then show us what we want to see.

Today, we are constantly contending with algorithms of all kinds, each one attempting to guess what we are thinking of, seeking, and desiring before we may even be aware of the answers. When I write an email, my Gmail app predicts which words and phrases I am trying to type and fills them in for me, as if reading my mind. Spotify stocks its screen with the musicians and albums it predicts that I am likely to listen to, which I often end up selecting simply out of habit. When I unlock my phone, photos from the past I may want to see — labeled “memories,” as if they existed in my subconscious — are pre-loaded, as are suggestions for apps I may want to open and friends I may want to text. Instagram offers a mood board of what its algorithm perceives as my interests: top-down photos of food, architecture snapshots, looping clips of prestige television shows. TikTok serves me an inexplicable avalanche of videos of people retiling their showers, and I inexplicably keep watching them, compelled in spite of myself. Surely there is more to my identity as a consumer of culture?

All of these small decisions used to be made one at a time by humans: A newspaper editor decided which stories to put on the front page and a magazine photo editor selected photographs to publish; a film programmer picked out which films to play in a theater’s season; an independent radio-station DJ assembled playlists of songs that fit their own mood and the particular vibe of a day or a place. While these decisions were of course subject to various social and economic forces, the person in charge of them ensured a basic level of quality, or even safety, that can be missing from Filterworld’s accelerated feeds.

Algorithmic recommendations are the latest iteration of the Mechanical Turk: a series of human decisions that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed. Designed and maintained by the engineers of monopolistic tech companies, and running on data that we users continuously provide by logging in each day, the technology is both constructed by us and dominates us, manipulating our perceptions and attention. The algorithm always wins.