Algorithms and Domination

Written by Elizabeth Nyamwange

Mathematics is our most exacting language as humans. In the natural world, a mathematical discovery that leads to provable logic will never change. The certainty of using something so absolute to define the natural world leads to a concrete understanding of the planet. 

Over 300 years ago Newton gave us a language for change that built the fields of modern physics and engineering. 200 years later, Maxwell proved that light is an electromagnetic wave, opening the door for wireless technology and all modern electronics. While both have provided us with theories that power ideas thought to be conceptually impossible, they represent a part of the field where theories are absolute. Mathematics as a field is not only concerned with provable ideas, but learning how to create new mathematical languages as the world evolves and grows.

I believe that to fully understand this concept, it is important to focus on algorithms specifically. Algorithms are precise, exact, recipes that are the backbone of most modern systems today. From drug discovery to delivery routes and even the design of standardized tests, almost everything we touch runs on algorithms.  They learn about the world by absorbing the information that we give them since mathematics as a field has never claimed to capture everything perfectly. 

The only reason that we are able to work with systems that we do not fully understand is through the idea of disciplining uncertainty. This field is a craft of learning how to get as close as possible, and build models to create efficient systems for what we are looking for. Since they run on the operating system of daily life, they are built around a very narrow template. For example, the 50th percentile male body is most visible to power through data and recorded history. This alone reproduces inequality in the safety features designed around this default. This exclusion can be inefficient or even lethal. Something that math would deem acceptable under the tolerance that's been allowed, still. 

To use math on people, we have to make life legible. We separate convoluted realities into boxes that categorize and calculate the worth of individual human beings. Those boxes are decisions that are posed as facts of nature and create the systems we operate in.  Additionally, math is used to create alibis as passive voices of power.  “The system decided”  and “The data says” lets institutions speak with no subject or author, just a conclusion deemed correct by mathematical logic widely conceptually misunderstood. 

As humans, we must be suspicious of algorithmic logic portrayed as absolute. I find the idea of any mathematical logic being absolute  conceptually flawed. In this logic, humans dominate the natural world as if tides negotiate with equations, and planets organize themselves in exclusive accordance with our models. The natural and proof based logic that math uses makes it the perfect language for domination, and makes rules feel like nature. In creating a math that is liberatory, we must use the logic of the field in a way that doesn’t impersonate nature to rule over others. Math is a tool to be used, not a master of any concept in its entirety. We must demand that models are never treated as destiny because of the simple fact they use mathematical equations.