“It is as if I have a brick on my stomach”—our stomach aches and we need to use an ‘as if’ to explain others what our experience feels like. This metaphoric language is necessary for us to describe the quality of the pain we experience. The bioethicist Engelhardt reminds us how our body is often opaque to us (1973). The opacity and recalcitrance of the body is comparable to the opacity and autonomous life of the algorithms that we use to organize our society. As they are becoming more and more the body of our collective lives, committing to make an algorithm as translucent as possible might be as challenging as making human bodies as readable as possible. In the same way as we need to know why our stomach hurts if we want to cure it, so we need to read through the opacity of an algorithm if we want to fix the malfunctioning of certain technology in our lives. In this paper I will examine how phenomenology and its metaphorical language can help the digital language of decision-making algorithms, especially in medical humanities, to comply to the ethical commitment to transparency. Namely, I will use phenomenology to shed light on the co-constitutive triad of user-designer-system in decision-making algorithms.