David Byrne curates the Meltdown Festival at London’s Southbank Centre, this second half of August. BBC Radio 6 Music chimed in with a David Byrne radio show this afternoon, which he presented as a competition with the algorithms that dish up music to us via services like Spotify. David Byrne makes his point against algorithms in an eloquent and funny way in the animated intro on the page linked above. If you like it, download the podcast. I can recommend it because he I think is better than an algorithm. However, that does not mean we can ignore algorithms. As I also noted in the tweet below, design anthropologists see value in studying the behaviour of algorithms, and open up the black box of these editors of the content we see and don’t see, simply because these algorithms have become central to our 21st Century culture.
