Fortune Cookies & Code: Fortune, Prediction, and Data Traces

​What kinds of fortunes do cookies predict?

​Web cookies work quietly in the background, recording movements, preferences, and habits in a language written for machines rather than people. They feed systems that predict what we might do next—what we will buy, click, fear, or desire—often producing consequences that are difficult to see, contest, or refuse. Fortune cookies offer a more visible and familiar scene of prediction: a message cracked open at the end of a meal, taken seriously when it resonates and dismissed as a joke when it does not.

​The fortune cookie itself is not neutral. Widely associated with Chinese restaurants, it is a mass-produced American invention, shaped by a long history of cultural projection. Its messages are written to be broadly relatable, inviting readers to see themselves in the text while leaving its origins and labor largely invisible. (See a trailer of Fremont (2023) for a brief glimpse.)

​This workshop examines cookies as instruments of algorithmic prediction and profiling, situating them within a longer history of forecasting, surveillance, and the human desire to know what comes next. Participants will examine the cookies stored in their own browsers and reflect on how small technical traces are translated into claims about identity, behavior, and future possibility.

​In the second half of the workshop, participants will reverse this logic by translating data traces into written “fortunes,” then physically making and sealing their own fortune cookies to take home.

​Please bring a laptop. No technical background required.

​Note: This workshop involves food ingredients including sugar, flour, and egg; please take this into account if you have allergies.