What Algorithms Want

Deeply researched and meticulously reasoned in a style that will meet academic standards while being hugely enjoyable and interesting to a general audience. Equally comfortable talking about Perry Mason and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ed Finn surveys a broad sweep of today's business and cultural worlds while explaining how they got to be that way in a historical context reaching back centuries.

Neal Stephenson, author of Seveneves, Reamde, and Snow Crash

Perhaps the greatest power in our society today—computation—remains unexamined in a cultural way. Ed Finn calls it our magic; what is present, powerful but unseen. Finn will help you see it.

Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick, Wired magazine

The 'algorithmic imagination'—Professor Finn's evocative concept—connects the generative machine and the intelligently creative human. Think about the suggestions that appear in the search field when you begin to enter a term; that is the algorithmic imagination at work in the culture machine known as the Internet. Through a series of provocative chapters, Finn explores encounters that mark the emergence of algorithmic culture—the search for the Star Trek computer, Bitcoin, etc. He reveals the messy entanglements of these culture machines as they both draw on and shape human culture.

Anne Balsamo, Dean, School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, University of Texas, Dallas

This is a brilliant and important work. I know of no other book that so ably describes the cultural work that algorithms do. Once you read this you won't think of algorithms as mere batches of code that guide processes. You will see them as actors in the world.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)

Beautifully crafted, technically lucid, and admirably precise, What Algorithms Want offers humanists a timely tutorial in the concept of the algorithm, while also offering a high-level analysis and sharp critique of algorithmic processes as they are implemented for and by us in our everyday media environments. But its true gift is the modeling of 'algorithmic reading,' a method that shows us how to become better readers—and makers—of culture and culture machines alike. Everyone who wonders 'how Netflix, Apple, or Google knows' needs to read this book.

Rita Raley, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

Ed Finn's What Algorithms Want shows us just how powerful computer programs and their helpers actually are, and the book needs no recourse to science fiction.

Los Angeles Review of Books