نُبْذَة Brief

“On the bottom of the screen, BREAKING NEWS was flashing on and off in red, but that meant nothing; they called it breaking news if Kim Kardashian farted.”
― Stephen King, Sleeping Beauties

“What is new about the emerging world order is that, for the first time, the United States can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it.”
― Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

“If one Googles “critical theory,” the first thing that pops up is a boxed definition that states: “crit-i-cal the-o-ry, noun, a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it. The term is applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School.”630 That is precisely correct. Note the words “culture” and “Frankfurt School.” Modern critical theory has grown out of that early Freudian-Marxism of the Frankfurt School.”
― Paul Kengor, The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration

“As black-box technologies become more widespread, there have been no shortage of demands for increased transparency. In 2016 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation included in its stipulations the "right to an explanation," declaring that citizens have a right to know the reason behind the automated decisions that involve them. While no similar measure exists in the United States, the tech industry has become more amenable to paying lip service to "transparency" and "explainability," if only to build consumer trust. Some companies claim they have developed methods that work in reverse to suss out data points that may have triggered the machine's decisions—though these explanations are at best intelligent guesses. (Sam Ritchie, a former software engineer at Stripe, prefers the term "narratives," since the explanations are not a step-by-step breakdown of the algorithm's decision-making process but a hypothesis about reasoning tactics it may have used.) In some cases the explanations come from an entirely different system trained to generate responses that are meant to account convincingly, in semantic terms, for decisions the original machine made, when in truth the two systems are entirely autonomous and unrelated. These misleading explanations end up merely contributing another layer of opacity. "The problem is now exacerbated," writes the critic Kathrin Passig, "because even the existence of a lack of explanation is concealed.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning