Care and Scale: Decorrelative Ethics in Algorithmic Recommendation

Abstract

The people who make algorithmic recommender systems want apparently incompatible things: they pride themselves on the scale at which their software works, but they also want to treat their materials and users with care. Care and scale are commonly understood as contradictory goals: to be careful is to work at small scale, while working at large scale requires abandoning the small concerns of care. Drawing together anthropological work on care and scale, this article analyzes how people who make music recommender systems try to reconcile these values, reimagining what care and scale mean and how they relate to each other in the process. It describes decorrelation, an ethical technique that metaphorically borrows from the mathematics of machine learning, which practitioners use to reimagine how values might relate with each other. This “decorrelative ethics” facilitates new arrangements of care and scale, which challenge conventional anthropological theorizing.

The artist and the automaton in digital game production

“…Instead of the agency of human actors or the automatism of anthropomorphised machines and racialised workers, this analysis engages with posthumanism to politicise the assimilative momentum of automation, which racially stratifies algorithmic cultural production according to mechanical and affective capabilities. Trade-offs between scalability and manual conditioning – of generative machines and robotic humans – are informed by what Seaver (2021) identifies as an imprecise opposition between care and scale. Accordingly, art solutions diminish handcrafting and other forms of articulation work to declare themselves as scalability.…”

“…Accordingly, art solutions diminish handcrafting and other forms of articulation work to declare themselves as scalability. However, care and scale can be decorrelated to recognise emergent forms of care within large scale projects (Seaver, 2021). Similarly, ideation and production in AAA art pipelines can be decorrelated so that asset creation and procedural handcrafting are not dismissed as derivative.…”

Tear gas in orbit

“…If smell helps us glimpse the emergent dimensions and forms that settler colonialism is taking, then it helps us see scale anew, as something premised on entanglements rather than gradations or nestings or magnitudes. Scale seems to carve out the world in its own image, enacting its own type of governance on the social imagination (Bird‐David, 2017; Seaver, 2021): nationhood (Anderson, 1983; Hannerz, 1997) and culture (Abu‐Lughod, 1996), for instance, can sometimes fuel persistent notions about essential human difference as if political borders determine life altogether. Yet existence, as Barad (2007, p. ix) writes, “is not an individual affair.…”

Modelling emotion, perfecting heart: disassembling technologies of affect with an android bodhisattva in Japan

“…Additionally, Yael Navaro‐Yashin (2009: 8) has famously demonstrated how the academic adoption of new conceptual apparatuses often incorporates the discarding or ‘ruination’ of others. Further, in his ethnography of programmers of music recommendation algorithms, Nick Seaver (2021) has used the term ‘decorrelative ethics’ to explain how engineers apply the technical language of ‘vectors’ to challenge convictions in the digital service industry that values of ‘care’ are inversely connected with those of ‘scale’. Moreover, as early as 1987, Aihwa Ong described how domestic electronics have ‘disrupted cultural patterns of relating and thinking’ (1987: 624) and ‘disassembled local conceptions of gender difference’ (1987: 622).…”