Algorithmic media have shifted from forecasting toward incubating collective uncertainty

Evidence

The striking popularity of astrology apps reveals a shift in the function of algorithmically powered media: from instruments of forecasting, prediction, and risk control to vehicles of collective uncertainty and incubators of the speculative sociality of our time. While they have little in common with the astrologists of the past, such platforms are part of a rapidly expanding assemblage of speculative technologies, which mediate the ways we imagine and experience contemporary finance capitalism. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 324

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion claim — that the same algorithmic machinery built for risk control now manufactures productive uncertainty — is dense enough to sit with for days.
• XREF: Connects to how spectacle and mediation reconfigure social life in Debord and to the reader’s broader thread on speculation as a social imagination-shaping force. — connects to: Empirical refutations of political echo chambers center on algorithms, not user choice — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 832; Behavioral surplus forecasting power drives a second imperative beyond extraction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 620; Algorithmic opacity itself generates speculation that drives platform engagement — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 291
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 324