The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information

320 Pages·2015·1.74 MB·English

by  Frank Pasquale

THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY

THE
BLACK BOX
SOCIETY
The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
FRANK PASQUALE
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2015
Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-P ublication Data
Pasquale, Frank.
The black box society : the secret algorithms that control money and
information / Frank Pasquale.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0-6 74-3 6827-9
1. Power (Social sciences) 2. Elite (Social sciences)
3. Knowledge, Theory of. 4. Observation (Psychology) I. Title.
HN49.P6.P375 2015
303.3—dc23
2014013480
For Ray
In Memory of my Parents

CONTENTS
1 Introduction—The Need to Know 1
2 Digital Reputation in an Era of Runaway Data 19
3 The Hidden Logics of Search 5 9
4 Finance’s Algorithms: The Emperor’s New Codes 101
5 Watching (and Improving) the Watchers 1 40
6 Toward an Intelligible Society 1 89
Notes 221
Ac know ledg ments 305
Index 307
[T]here is one world in common for those who are awake, but
[when] men are asleep each turns away into a world of his own.
—Heracleitus
Million-f uelèd, ꞌ nature’s bonfi re burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ꞌ to her, her clearest- selvèd spark
Man, how fast his fi redint, ꞌ his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
1
INTRODUCTION—THE NEED
TO KNOW
E
VERYBODY KNOWS the story about the man crawling intently
around a lamppost on a dark night. When a police offi cer comes along
and wants to know what he’s doing, he says he’s looking for his keys.
“You lost them here?” asks the cop. “No,” the seeker replies, “but this
is where the light is.” This bromide about futility has lately taken on
a whole new meaning as a metap hor for our increasingly enigmatic
technologies.
There’s a noble tradition among social scientists of trying to clar-
ify how power works: who gets what, when, where, and why.1 Our
common life is explored in books like The Achieving Society, The
Winner-Take-All Society, The Good Society, and The Decent Society. At
their best, these works also tell us why such inquiry matters.2
But efforts like these are only as good as the information available.
We cannot understand, or even investigate, a subject about which
nothing is known. Amateur epistemologists have many names for
this problem. “Unknown unknowns,” “black swans,” and “deep se-
crets” are pop u lar catchphrases for our many areas of social blank-
ness.3 There is even an emerging fi eld of “agnotology” that studies
the “structural production of ignorance, its diverse causes and con-
formations, whether brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia,
extinction, secrecy, or suppression.” 4