Beyond Behaviorism and Black Boxes
Megan Boler, Elizabeth A. Davis · 2020
In Silicon Valley, the preferred vocabulary is, bizarrely, predominantly a vocabulary of behaviorism. One can hear this over and over again. Business people are explaining their product using a vocabulary of behaviorism, where their “product” is us, an audience or voting public. The producers of these “products” explain their efficacy in terms that many psychologists of the 1950s (and before) would have felt perfectly comfortable using. To call authenticity algorithmic is not simply to say that authenticity is determined algorithmically, but that authenticity has always been algorithmic: the following of certain instructions. Most classically authenticity is following the command: to thine own self be true. Authenticity is fundamentally dramatic. In order to ameliorate incivility a host of mobilizations take place across civic culture. Libraries hold civil society debates on difficult topics. Facebook gets pressured to come up with policies to deal with their role in the intensification of hate speech.