Kerim's Triptych ❧ Marriage Cops, Algorithms, Triple Deer

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1️⃣ Marriage Cops

I'm terribly excited for Shashwati who, together with her friend Cheryl, is in Toronto today to attend the world premier of Marriage Cops, their new documentary film. In the lead up to the festival they did a bunch of publicity, and I particularly like this interview, done by Susan Cole for POV Magazine.

A state-supported social service designed to salvage failing marital relations? Sounds like an unlikely proposition, but that’s exactly where Marriage Cops aims its clear-eyed lens. In doing so, filmmakers Shashwati Talukdar and Cheryl Hess underscore Indian marriage values, the needs of women, and the way a country’s bureaucratic institution copes with a singularly challenging mandate. The film, which has its world premiere at Hot Docs this week, observes a progressive method in system resistant to change.

The interview touches on one of my favorite aspects of the film—something that almost gets lost in all the drama. Yes, it is a film about marriages, and about cops, but it is also a film about paperwork.

“The staff are barely containing the chaos,” explains Talukdar. “That’s why the sole male cop is so very concerned about registers and getting things labelled correctly. I understood that he feels that drawing straight lines [literally] and having things put neatly on the page might contain the chaos.”

And there is a mountain of paperwork that has to be handled with not a computer in sight. Cinematographer Hess makes the most of what seem like endless shelves of file folders that the team is constantly rifling through.

“Yes, the paperwork is its own character,” she says. “We should have given the file folders their own credit.”

2️⃣ Algorithms

One of my long-term goals has been to start writing and publishing opinion pieces somewhere other than on my own blog, so I'm happy to announce that I have a new piece, written together with Gabriele de Seta, that just got published in Tech Policy Press.

Titled "Algorithms Don't Make the Rules," the piece argues that

We should work together to demystify algorithms, unmask their creators’ claims, and, most importantly, realize that we already are—as readers, viewers, commenters, creators, curators, and even creators of our own feeds—our best informational infrastructure.

I asked Gabriele to work on this with me because he studies "algorithmic folklore" (popular beliefs about algorithms) for a living, running a long-term project on this topic at the University of Bergen. Together, we look at some of the myths and fears about algorithms, as well as apps like Bluesky that seem to be doing something new and different.

I was particularly pleased that we included a link to the "Fucking replies" custom Bluesky feed by user \‪@xunlingau.bsky.social. It shows any reply with the word "fuck" in it—across multiple languages. It is not only a colorful example of what is possible, but it is also a genuinely fun feed to browse through.

3️⃣ Triple Deer

I'd like to thank my friend Ashish Valentine for turning me on to this Taiwanese "post rock" band that released a new album with Pangcah (Amis) lyrics. (The mother of the lead singer is Pangcah.) I'm sharing the song "romi'ami'ad" or "every day" which I particularly liked.

Endnote

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