For the Algo

Fires broke out and everyone posted about it on social media. Worry, confusion, images of flames and smoky sunsets, then a raft of “I’m OK”s, for those far away who thought that all of Los Angeles was an inferno. Soon after, the gofundmes began, and then the clothing drives, followed by please no more clothing, but money is still needed. A week later David Lynch dies and suddenly the still unfolding disaster is replaced by images of his gelswept hair, substituting the current apocalypse with cliquey kitschiness as everyone reaches for the right words and images to convey both performative sadness and a deep intimacy with Twin Peaks trivia. A moment of outrage concerning our current presidential administration barely registers as a blip, before a brief pivot to images of ash as people are allowed back into areas ravaged by disaster and then we’re quickly back to art openings and pictures of everyone looking cute. The gofundmes haven’t disappeared, we’re barely past this chapter here, we are still very much in this present moment, despite the rains, but social media moves on. No one wants to watch the same episode again, unless it’s an episode about cats. Cats infected the internet with toxoplasmosis, we have no choice but to freely give them attention.

We are trainable, we have been trained. We are good employees and we do what we are told. Employed by all cats who suck energy from our eyeballs, but mostly employed by giant corporations that translate eyeball energy into cash. We’re wrapped around Zuck’s finger. We have been for awhile, of course, but suddenly we’re cool with it, we want everyone to know that we know and that it’s okay to credit “the algorithm” for posting pouty or smiling selfies. “For the algorithm,” people are writing, or sometimes in the diminutive “for the algo,” as if illuminating the fact that we are being controlled makes it palatable. Like, haha, we know we’re better than this, but we’re cute to do it anyhow, and everyone’s in on the joke.

I’m searching far and wide for the escape hatch, for ways to keep conversations going without enriching billionaires, but once the market has been cornered, it’s nearly impossible to claw it back. All those town government agencies outsourcing communication avenues to Meta, what worked before now gutted, citizen communication hijacked, slicked up and stuffed with advertising, operating on the whim of a sketchy broligarch. We’re living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds. They’re trying to sell us stuff all the time, and at the same time selling us, figuring out how to extract profit from all sides of the market, the consumer becomes the product and the product pays to get hooked up with the consumer too. It’s a win-win for the nerds, now denizens of the manosphere, libertarian loners. Those are our bosses, boys with subzero fridges stuffed with rotting take-out containers and red bulls.

Prostituting oneself to the algo. Looking as good as possible in the first image, kissy face for the algo, coy, sassy, the algorithm needs flesh. Give me what I want, it says, and I will give you likes, I will give you exposure, I will push your shit out to the whole wide world, you will be a creator, you will be an influencer, you will be the biggest sweetest coconut cream layer cake in the entire universe. Algo as siren, whispering, controlling, luring, destroying.

I get it, I do. When attention is the currency, you always want more and more. It’s tough to look away, even harder to walk. But I’m not a happy employee, my data is bled out, I have no more to share. And I’m refusing to do this showing of face for some automated system, it just feels too pathetic a price to pay, keeping face recognition libraries current or whatever the ulterior motive might be. Do I have to do all this?

What will it take for us to refuse to cooperate, to take our energy elsewhere? For years we’ve taken the path of least resistance, sharing our collective anger and disgust, clicking on icons of hearts and paper airplanes, sharing and lurking and rolling our eyes and biding our time, wasting our time. We’re model employees, following the playbook of public fretting, public celebration, public outrage, and public mourning, those who refuse to comply relegated to the depths of insignificance. We are cows in the field; when the troughs of water move, we move with them, together, as a big group, slowly but surely, captivated. And with or without our screens, we are actually social creatures, getting what we want, albeit the junk food version, all the tasty bits with zero nutrition.

Once we’ve tasted the illusion of relevance, do we have the capacity for happiness that doesn’t get posted? Or are we trapped bleeding data while eating the crumbs, our outrage monetized and gamified, enriching those we disdain, powerless to crawl away?