The Black Box You Carry Around All Day

You spend all day feeding data into systems you don’t understand—photo apps, messaging platforms, search engines that know what you want before you’ve finished typing—and the operating assumption is that none of this requires explanation. It just works, until it doesn’t, at which point you feel helpless in a surprisingly personal way.

Fiona is a Berlin-based developer and researcher who’d spent years working through internet technologies, digitization, and net culture. In 2014 she launched Looking Into Black Boxes with collaborators Jan and Dirk—a YouTube series aimed at making algorithmic thinking legible to people who’d never once wondered how any of their devices actually worked. The title is precise: algorithms are exactly that, black boxes that accept inputs and produce outputs without showing their reasoning, and most people move through dozens of them daily without any mental model of what’s happening inside.

The approach was friendly without being condescending, technically grounded without tipping into jargon. The iPhones and MacBooks of your life don’t have to be magic. Understanding even the rough shape of how they function changes your relationship to them—makes you a slightly less passive participant in systems you’re already embedded in, whether you opted in consciously or not.

Bits and bytes really are your friends. More or less.