I’ve been thinking a lot about how our lives are increasingly governed by algorithms made by billion-dollar corporations. They’re deciding what we’re supposed to like and only showing us that kind of stuff so we don’t get to broaden our horizons, and there’s no reason for artists to take the risk of making something new. The funny thing is that they aren’t even showing us what we want to see – the algorithm isn’t concerned with us – only our attention – so it shows us what will keep us scrolling (and pumping our data into and buying, etc). Who cares what we want?
We were eased into this situation, of course. If someone came up to you back in the Nokia discophone days and said, “Hey, let me give you this thing to put in front of your face 24/7 that will show you things that will kill your attention span while influencing you to buy a bunch of crap you can’t afford,” would you say yes? But no – back in the day Facebook, Twitter, and everyone else showed us an actual timeline of what our friends were posting in the order that they posted stuff. There were no influencers, no short-form video, and no constant ads. If you think about it, it’s all an ad. What’s the saying? “If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product?” It’s 100% true, and you must have been living under a rock if you haven’t figured that out yet.
I’ve been reading so much about this mess that I’ve had to take a step back from it and focus on reading fiction for my mental health. Since I’m pretty much off of social media now (I do still have Youtube and Reddit – and I have Bluesky, but I had to stop using that one because it’s an automatic path to doomscrolling), I’ve been doing a lot more reading. I subscribed to The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and I’m beginning to regret both because (for obvious reasons) I can’t seem to ignore the politics because the culture pieces I’m interested in are so intertwined at this point.
I think my personal issue with this comes down to my (and our!) total lack of control over what’s going on – not only in Washington and Silicon Valley, but in our own heads and our own lives. The almighty algorithm essentially takes away any intentionality we had when choosing our entertainment – or our news. Again, it shows us what will keep us scrolling, which means short-form stuff that we’ll either agree with or be angry enough about to interact with (rage bait, anyone?). Youtube is especially bad about rage bait – it centers my focus on how awful social media is and how everything we see is rooted in capitalism and consumerism not because I necessarily enjoy watching that content (and certainly not because it’s good for me), but because it keeps me watching. At this point, I’m overwhelmed.
What’s funny is that I’m 100% confident that whatever Youtube shows you has little or no commonality with what it shows me. Most of the stuff I scroll through daily isn’t stuff I’ve ever searched for – but it’s stuff Youtube has tried on me, and I took the bait, and now that’s my feed. Yes, I can use one of those browser extensions that gets rid of the feed or use a different channel to refresh things, but whenever I try the latter, I always end up back at my regular feed, scrolling and scrolling and getting angrier and more overwhelmed. This stuff is bad for me. It’s bad for us.
But I keep scrolling. I don’t think I could give up Youtube like I could Meta apps and Twitter. If I’m addicted to any social media, that’s it. I only watch long-form videos, so I tell myself at least there’s that. We’re so used to being bombarded with information in the form of “entertainment” that we can’t envision a world without it. Sure, reading is great, and I absolutely love to read, but I sure can stare at moving passive entertainment on a screen (with autoplay!) longer than I can stare at a book.
I don’t have a solution other than to keep an eye on our screen time or ask our friends for recommendations. Under our present cultural circumstances, I don’t know that there is one without the internet suddenly going away, which would shut down the world at this point, so we can’t have that. Which means it’s up to individuals to pull ourselves away from these platforms and algorithms that were specifically created to make and keep us hooked, to be addictive. It’s really frustrating.
I guess I’ll go scroll Reddit now. I’m pretty sure there are still a few humans over there.
(P.S. I promise all my posts won’t be this negative – there’s a post I really want to write about two books that are very similar but very different at the same time, but I was thinking about this on my way to work this morning, so here you go. I’ll get to work on the book post soon.)
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