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Sorry, But Humanity Can’t be Coded
Why our messy, beautiful cultural habits resist being reduced to clean lines of computer code. Culture can’t be coded.
The dark room in Silicon Valley, lit only by the glow of screens and the flashing lights of the server racks and a few dimmed pot lights thrummed quietly. Suddenly the voice of the lead architect squeaked loudly, “We’ve got it!”. Now they could predict at least six months ahead what cultural trends emerge. The room erupted in applause, the energy vibrating them all.
Thousands of miles away, in a small village in Oaxaca, a grandmother taught her granddaughter to weave patterns into a blanket. Patterns that had evolved over centuries, deeply rooted with cultural symbols. Ones that no data point could capture. As the child’s fingers worked the threads, a new pattern emerged. One that would subtly transform their village’s artistic traditions and meanings. But that algorithm in Silicon Valley had a blind spot. It could never have detected this pattern.
There are those thought leaders and thinkers, often coders, who believe that human culture can be reduced to algorithms. As I’ve often said, that is culture on a diet. It is a fallacy of Silicon Valley to think it is possible. It is not. Here is my view.
It is not that we can’t codify some aspects oh human behaviours or elements of culture, it’s…
