The God, the Market and the Algorithm

It has been a clear, warm afternoon in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where strangers are kind and beauty is overflowing.

And there I was, at a service of lessons and carols at a small Midwestern church. My lessons are these:

We have two overlords now: the Market and the Algorithm. There used to be another: god. By now, his scheduled appearances in public life have been mostly relegated to the “festive season.” These appearances are tucked away into the private spaces that are least at risk of spilling over into, and contaminating, the corporate space. While certain historical continuity and, with it, communion with the imaginary friends from the past has been lost, a brave new communication line with the future has been opened, to brave new friendships with imaginary friends from the future. This is how it ought to be. While there is future in the past, there is more future in the future.

God has been replaced by the Market. Both attract by satisfying similar psychological needs. The Market, in addition, delivers material bounty. Kelly Brown Douglas’s description of man’s relationship to god (cited as a lesson at the service) describes man’s relationship to the Market equally well: “God is aways, always coming towards us, not esoterically but in the movements towards justice; towards freedom, which are always perfect reflections of God’s love. We are people that must be going towards the god that is coming to us, and we do that through acts of justice.” The Market’s occluded hand similarly guides us towards prosperity by enlisting people’s selfish motives in service of the common good. In turn, we, the people, owe it to the market to address its imperfections, to complete its omissions, and to regulate it if necessary, in order to move towards it and meet it where all gains from mutually beneficial transactions will have been exhausted.

Like god, the Market grants one just enough agency to feel alive — as when shopping for a sofa or looking for a job — but not so much agency as to overwhelm and paralyse. One is not responsible for the provenance of the goods bought in the anonymous Market just as one is not responsible for all the injustice in the world perpetrated by god. Like god, the Market is an impersonal force. If a corner coffee shop goes out of business, it does so not thanks to anyone’s personal failings in particular. It had to be this way; there is simply no Market niche for the coffee shop at that spot at that time. Yet, like god, the Market is anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism confers upon it similar moral authority. One accepts the Market’s assessment of one’s own worth and even more readily accepts the Market’s assessment of the worth of others. Like god, the Market is inscrutable. “God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension,” said Freeman Dyson. The Market mind is the hive mind that aggregates the impulses and the judgements of a myriad of dispersed traders into the market outcome.

When the Market ceases to reign supreme, some will look back at it wistfully. Perhaps, one day, a loyal minority will attend holiday processions with lessons that honour free-market economics. Carols will be sung, drawn from the musicals of the pre-code era — the era before the Algorithm was capable of dispensing seemingly superior answers to the questions about how much and what to consume, how to apply oneself, and which opinions to share and with whom. The Algorithm — the successor of the Amazon and the Netflix recommendation systems — will be appropriately incomprehensible and appropriately wise. The Algorithm, not unlike today’s GPT, will be duly anthropomorphic, too. The Algorithm will distance us from, and absolves us of, the choices that are inconvenient while enabling us to revel in entertaining the tantalising alternatives choosing among which one seemingly cannot go wrong.

Unlike the Market, however, the Algorithm will be inherently backward-looking. For the Algorithm, good tomorrow’s you will preserve statistical fidelity to yesterday’s you. Your new curated imaginary friends will be but an amalgam of anonymised entities from the sanitised past.

Until then, Merry Christmas.

Thank you kindly.