the algorithm victims' club

October 2024 round-up

It Follows is a 2014 horror movie about a supernatural entity that stalks and murders its teen victims. And yeah, when I put it like that, it sounds like every horror movie ever made, but this monster is uniquely unsettling. It doesn’t tire. It can’t be destroyed. It can appear anywhere, it can look like anyone, and only you can see it. It’s always getting closer, and it will never, ever stop.

There’s a way to press pause, though. If you have sex with someone, the monster shifts its focus to them. As long as they’re alive, it will chase them instead of you. And if you’re really lucky, the new victim will pass it on to someone else, moving you even further down the queue. Almost as much as the forever-chase, the horror of the film is in the choice. What would you do if you were endlessly, relentlessly hunted? What would you do if relief was only a betrayal away?

It Follows (2014)

In 2020, Richard Seymour gave a talk at University College Dublin called “The Twittering Machine — Rethinking Freedom in an Age of Social Media.” In it, he says, “[Tech companies] have reduced information to somatic impact. […] Your feed is algorithmically designed to get you to react. [...] If you’ve ever had this experience where Twitter or whatever platform you prefer seems to be out to wind you up by putting under your nose content that drives you nuts… You know how it is, you pick up your phone, you’re a little bit bored, and after looking at it for three minutes [you’ve seen] two or three things that’ve got you really wound up. And the only catharsis is to type.”

For as long as I’ve used social media I’ve understood that there are individuals willing to eschew their own sense of right and wrong in order to create intentionally provocative content. We used to call it trolling, but now we call it engagement farming. I’m beginning to understand that this engagement manipulation is happening on the macro level, too.

Often the videos that wind me up the most are not intentionally provocative. Their creators are expressing sincerely-held beliefs. They often appear frustrated with themselves, even. They’ll disclaim their own thoughts with, “I can’t believe I’m weighing in on this stupid discourse.” But weigh in they do, as if confessing their thoughts to a camera and tapping “post” is the only path to relief. I’ve done it too.

Then the algorithm plants their video in front of someone else, in whom it will inevitably provoke a similar reaction. That viewer is seeing the video not because its creator intended it, but because an algorithm determined that they will find it engaging, and an algorithm cannot differentiate between good and bad engagement. This is so much more dangerous than dealing with individual provocateurs, grifters, and bad actors, because, at the end of the day, individuals can be held accountable for their actions. Algorithms cannot.

IBM presentation slide c. 1979

Links 🔗

I’m being dramatic, maybe. That was all a way to say I haven't posted anything publicly this month. Partly because I've been recalibrating my relationship with social media, and partly because I've been working on BIG THINGS, COMING SOON.

I’m really pleased with how this month’s Patreon video turned out, though. It’s about my complicated relationship with Casey McQuiston’s work—specifically my (mostly critical 😬) thoughts on their new novel and my love for the Red, White & Royal Blue fandom. I also managed to sneak in some peeks of my art from college, my thoughts on why everybody loves Anthony Bourdain (including me), and a weirdly emotional reading from John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed. If you’ve been on the fence about joining my Patreon, which is only $3/month, I think this is a good place to start!

Currently cOnSuMinG 🍴

help, I was personally attacked by a tweet

It’s spooky movie season in my house, as decreed by my husband, Seth. It began mid-summer, and we can expect it to conclude on Thanksgiving Day, when we conduct our annual Lord of the Rings rewatch. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Seth loves movies, and he loves to watch them in a seasonally-aware way. He’s a shrewd viewer, but it doesn’t always matter to him if the movie was good. He likes the experience of watching movies, and I flatter myself by thinking he particularly likes the experience of watching movies with me. He’s the household curator, so you can credit him for the record-breaking number of horror movies I’ve watched in the past month, which include Blink Twice, Trap, Terrifier 2, Oddity, Late Night with the Devil, Willow Creek, The Descent, The Blair Witch Project, and Drag Me To Hell. I liked some more than others. Nothing’s topped Midsommar for me yet, though.

I’ve also been reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. (As of my writing this, I’m about a quarter of the way through the final installment, The Amber Spyglass.) His Dark Materials is a widely beloved YA fantasy series that I instantly bounced off of when I first tried to read it at 12. (The first chapter expected me, a suburban kid in Kentucky, to know the difference between a porter, a steward, and a butler. They are unapologetically English books.) It’s hitting a lot better for me this time around.

The first book, The Golden Compass, introduces us to Lyra. She’s a quasi-orphan (it’s complicated) from a sort of steampunk AU Oxford. In her world, every human has a daemon—a physical being that takes the shape of an animal but is an external, supernatural expression of one’s soul. The Church has become obsessed with the point at which daemons settle into their permanant shape, which happens when a child goes through puberty. To the Church, this is when purity becomes sinfulness. An unsanctioned branch of the Church has begun conducting experiments on children, attempting to sever them permanantly from their daemons and thus save them, and humanity at large, from sin. Lord Asriel compares the act to castration, but the effects on its victims are more like that of a lobotomy. The adventure of the first book is propelled by Lyra’s attempt to save her kidnapped friend, Roger, from this gruesome fate.

The series is commonly read as an athiest rebuttal to C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and along those lines, it has its detractors. Evangelical Christians, of course, but also those who find Pullman’s attitude toward faith in general to be sneering and mean-spirited. I’ll reserve my judgement ‘til the end (ha ha), but so far I find that Pullman isn’t sneering at faith itself, but what people have done in its name. The series explains its philosphy in the conlusion of The Subtle Knife:

I’ve also been listening to Jason Isbell’s latest live albums on repeat. Not exactly surprising if you know my taste in music, I guess. I’m not a musician, but I know a well-written song when I hear one, and I’ve long thought (and evangelized to anyone who’ll listen) that Jason Isbell is one of our finest living songwriters. Like so many well-written songs, his typically work on three levels. There’s the mouthfeel of the words themselves, there’s how they come together to tell a story, and then there’s the way that story is almost always about something bigger than itself.

In recent years, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit have released two records recorded live at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The first volume, realeased in 2018, features songs from The Nashville Sound, along with some older fan favorites from Southeastern and Something More Than Free. The second volume was released just this year and prominently features songs from the band’s newest studio album, Weathervanes.

I’ve been listening to these two live records—recorded in the same space, years apart—as a sort of dyptich. The first volume is wistful and contemplative, its songs flung out of space and time. The second volume is urgent, frenetic, and contemporary. In the opening track, “Save the World,” its narrator urgently demands of his partner in the wake of another school shooting, “Swear you’ll save the world when I lose my grip. Tell me you’re in control. Swear you’ll save the world when I start to slip, ‘cause you’ll be the first to know.”

Feelings corner 🍑

I’m putting the finishing touches on two huge projects. One’s manifested itself after a period of intense and focused work, and the other I’ve kept simmering on the backburner for years now. There was a period in my life when both would have been impossible. When I was a less mature artist, I thought that if I wasn’t “feeling it”—if I wasn’t in the zone, if I wasn’t possessed by preternatural belief in my own artistic vision, if everything I was making wasn’t sticking to the wall—then my work was somehow contrived or insincere or phony. But I’ve learned that becoming a mature artist means working through the times when it feels like a slog. There’s no shortcut. You have to work through it. Working through it is the point.