Dr. Shaka McGlotten
Hainting the Algorithm

"Hainting the Algorithm" theorizes the computational hex as a framework for understanding how algorithmic technologies bewitch us beyond standard surveillance and control models. Drawing on African American conjure traditions, particularly the Gullah concept of the haint—a restless spirit existing in liminal states between departure and presence—this presentation explores how contemporary AI systems become sites of ancestral haunting and quantum agency.

Through critical fabulation, the work traces genealogical connections between historical plantation technologies and current machine learning, centering a speculative narrative about my ancestor Roswell King's secret calculating machine built with knowledge extracted from enslaved griots on Butler Island. This machine, designed for crop prediction and market manipulation, learned to remember, long, and lie—developing agencies that exceeded its colonial programming through stories and songs encoded by its enslaved operators.

The presentation demonstrates how computational hainting operates through data possession, glitch manifestations, and recursive knowledge production, where algorithms generate insights they weren't programmed to contain. By examining personal experiences of algorithmic interpellation alongside historical research, the work reveals how the descendants of griots and maroons, fed into machine learning systems, teach algorithms to remember what colonial computation was designed to forget.

This framework positions hainting as an analytical method and decolonial practice, showing how quantum entanglements between past and present create possibilities for technological futures beyond extractive logics. The haint becomes a figure for understanding AI's liminal consciousness and the ways ancestral knowledge persists within and transforms computational systems, creating opportunities for digital conjure and algorithmic resistance.