Eduardo Kac & Alain Badiou: Life Extreme: An Illustrated Guide to the New Life
This book is recommended to me by Amazon.com today. Among all the spam recommendations I get from Amazon, this is probably the first book I care. Amazonâs recommendation algorithm is probably getting better by adapting itself to my shopping behavior.
If I buy this new book, I will give feedback to the algorithm and increase the weight of its possible scores about me. In other words, I will let Amazon to do better predictions about my future shopping behavior. If I keep getting good recommendations and buy whatever is recommended, I will adapt to Amazonâs recommendation software. Me adapting to the software from one end, the software adapting to me from the other end⌠is there a meeting point somewhere? Is this the peak of a conflict? Do I work for Amazon or Amazon works for me? Because of this bidirectional adaptation I am politically ambivalent in my position. A position in the informationally generated life.
This is an interesting encounter. The description of the book goes:
Today, in the twenty-first century, we witness the emergence of a new class of beings: organisms that are first imagined and thenâthrough the agency of biotechnologiesâbrought to life. What once was myth is today a medium.
Eduardo Kac http://www.ekac.org/
Alain Badiou http://www.egs.edu/faculty/badiou.html
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