How to confuse the algorithm for self betterment
As we’re all aware, the machines we’ve come to know and trust have gotten quite good at feeding us ideas they think we’ll appreciate. Whatever your application, or media source of choice, everything about the content you consume, the location, duration, style, regularity, even the advertisements you see are currently being tailored to optimize the experience the algorithm thinks you should be having. Often this works seamlessly predicting stories you might enjoy, foods you might be hungry for, places you’d like to visit. But what if you don’t know what you want? What if you’d rather be surprised each day by brand new concepts and questions you hadn’t thought to ask. What if you’d prefer a sense of childlike wonder where the world is a grab bag every day is a clean slate. Most would suggest, for an approach like this, to step away from the computer completely, to head out into the world and allow for humanity to nourish new potential. While I don’t disagree and have certainly put in my fair share of time as a semi-professional explorer of humanity, the current global lockdown has indeed put a damper on the distances we can travel and the number of hands we can shake.
Beyond that, to take a tool with such promise as social media and disregard it completely in favor of a campaign of total abstinence seems at its core a misuse of a great opportunity. Why does this still very new and very unmined resource have to be given over to the gods of advertising so willingly? When reading about the advent of the printing press I learned that the most popular early books were travel stories, personal accounts which allowed the reader for the first time in human history the ability to learn about a world beyond their own. This notion is mirrored in the early days of still photography, radio, moving pictures, and onward toward the internet 1.0. Tell me what it looks like where you are. Show me how you’re getting by. However, at some point in recent years it seems they, or we, or I have somehow lost the plot. The ability to self-select subgenres within subgenres and for the computer to work our bidding has begun to produce a new generation who might be knowingly or unknowingly opting in to a life in the warm sweet comfort of the echo chamber. Whatever your favorite flavor of information, no matter how deep the cut, you can feast for hours, days, years without disruption. It’s a life we’ve likely all lived, knowingly or unknowingly despite our best efforts to be informed and curious citizens.
Like most of you when I first signed up for these various platforms I followed my close friends, names I’d been told we had in common, popular voices that made me laugh, then as time went on I mostly forgot about the active nature of engagement, and fell asleep, allowing for the infrastructure to deliver the goods, a smile when waiting in line for a movie, news about a child born to an old friend back home, a beautiful image of a sunset, a delicious meal here and there. As the platforms evolved and took on newer and deeper potentials the wave of friends and strangers attempting to sell their wares rose proportionally, as did the collective political awareness, everyone’s desire to comment and critique the news of the now, the chase for fans and likes. I am as guilty as any party in this quest, and am not here to shame anyone for how they choose to use a platform or earn a living. But as evinced by the recent U.S. election cycle and the sometimes dangerous amount of disinformation it produced on all sides I do wonder what the future holds for these digital spaces.
As my son nears adulthood I can see the computer telling him what to watch and how to listen, as it does for each of us, and I consider all the ways we might try to confuse and therefore enrich these suggestions. Personally I’ve begun the active pursuit of self-randomization. Clicking links I might never have otherwise chosen, regularly purging the accounts I follow even if it means missing out on my best friends stories, attempting to discover worlds that have nothing to do with my own. Given unfettered access to the best and brightest minds, experts in every field in almost every digestible form why do we so often default to local news and gossip for our daily nourishment. I can’t say for certain. Nor can I offer any real solutions. I can’t be sure that my attempts to trick the algorithm will bear any fruit, or for that matter won’t eventually play right into the hands of the algorithm itself. As studies have shown, human attempts at true randomization are rarely if ever random.
In a perfect world my feed would be full with voices I’ve never heard and places I’d never seen. To be able to glimpse through the window of a sixty-five year old retired dock worker in Madagascar, to read the daily diary of an aspiring primary school teacher in Laos, to hear the tales of tax evasion in Andorra, the shipwrecks of Kiribati, the crumbling architecture of Chisinau all while stood at a traffic light or out for a quiet fall stroll. What a gift. What potential. What an opportunity to learn. There’s science and history, and mystery and hope around every possible corner, and all at the push of a button. And it’s up to me to make the most of. If you have any suggestions for how to better achieve this goal, don’t hesitate to reach out. This is an ongoing process, life in the digital transition, and I’m sure it’ll take years before any of us really knows what’s going on. In the meanwhile I’ll attempt to keep up my end of the bargain, being an active citizen of the world and reporting back my findings in whatever poetic ways I can. Hopefully offering something you’ve never seen framed in a way you’ve never considered, and continuing the cycle of growth onward and upward til the end.
