The new Space Jam is apocalyptic horror
On Monday night, I sat in a dark theater, staring up at the movie screen, asking myself a perhaps-unanswerable question: What exactly does Hollywood think an “algorithm” is?
By definition, an algorithm is a set of operations (often rendered in code and meant for a computer) designed to solve a problem — calculating a number, showing you information based on data a device has collected about you, finding the answer to a question you’ve asked, or some much more complicated sequence. It’s a little black box into which you shove a set of parameters and boom, out comes a solution.
But Hollywood seems to have a much weirder and more mystical conception of algorithms. No surprise, since the movies and computers have never really played well together — see any movie about hackers made before the 21st century or the long-running trope of technologically improbable “computer, enhance” commands. Run through the screenwriter’s filter, computers and code get squashed into vague, implausible fantasies that bear little resemblance to reality.
Here in 2021, “algorithms” are the latest mysterious force to mess with our lives, as attractive to screenwriters as mainframes and “the world wide web” once were. There’s been a rise in the use of algorithms as integral parts of a story, some more plausible than others.
