Mirror, mirror on the screen, “Wherein can I find me?” – On the sublime qualities of AI recommendation systems, algorithm conformity, and the else
提出算法推荐系统具有崇高特质，能影响个体自我认知，导致“算法从众”行为，但推荐中的认知扭曲（他者）可能打破这种控制，引发集体抵抗。
Algorithmic persuasion is a mode of organizing that happens through inducing experiences that covertly seek to influence behavior by presenting an ongoing stream of affective recommendations. This essay advances the thesis that this mode of algorithmic organizing has the capacity to affect individuals’ sense of their self and explores how and why this may happen. It suggests that individuals may be susceptible to experiencing AI recommendation systems as sublime. Their sublime qualities give normative force to their recommendations and, through them, appeal to one’s affective drives, fears, and hopes, revealing who or what one is or may become. This subjecting of one’s self to these recommendations warrants two critical observations: a behavioral preference we call “people-like-you” and the emergence of “algorithm conformity” as an organizing force. Yet, there can be epistemic corruption in the recommendations. This epistemic corruption is the else , whose experience can evoke uncanny feelings and carries with it the possibility to break the spell of the sublime and to escape and resist algorithm conformity. But can such experiences, individual and dispersed, give rise to actions of collective resistance in a world of algorithmic capitalism?