As social media goes harder on inserting outside paid content into my interactions as a way of monetising my otherwise worthless attention, I have become the victim, like all of us, of the algorithms turning up to ten. I mean, they know me. They get it kind of right. I’m not quiet about my interests. But it’s starting to bleak me out.
Algorithms are a terrible way to serve human curiosity. So, because I like music and The Beatles, my feeds fill with stuff about guitars and Geoff Emerick… Which I am obviously interested in. So I click and reinforce that loop. It turns one of my interests into my only interest. It narrows my horizons. What my brain and soul needs, and likes, is mad distraction into avenues that I’m not interested in… yet.
Not being interested YET is the opposite of algorithmic culture. It is the model of linear broadcasting. It’s how, say, Radio 4 works, or the London Review of Books. Or a good print newspaper. Or flicking through a live EPG looking for something to watch. And I can’t simulate that by either looking for specific stuff – I won’t go looking for stuff I don’t know I want yet – or by surrendering to the end product of data harvesting.
The idea of serving an audience who are not into something YET is one of my favourites. It’s not easy. Certainly not as easy as pandering to existing interests and fandoms. To feed that demand, you need to have developed trust. Your audience needs to be there already, and know that the brand of your magazine or blog or broadcasting channel is strong enough to hold all sorts of content with the guarantee that it has been curated well.
That’s why we lose clunky and unfashionable media like linear broadcasting and print newspapers and magazines at our peril. There’s no way of doing this if the user is placed right at the centre of the experience. It concerns me that the whole of the digital content revolution was focused on the idea of the consumer as the sole informed agent; that we would want newspapers that just gave us the headlines we wanted. That the customer was always right.
As Mad Men’s Don Draper said, referencing the pointlessness of focus groups, “Customers don’t know what they want until you show them.”
Ask me what I like, and I’ll tell you the same half a dozen things. That’s me. I’ve literally got the T-shirts. But I didn’t know I liked those things until someone – a relative or a friend or a trusted writer or an artist I admire – told me to check them out. My entire identity is collaged from other people’s tastes that I gathered like a bird scavenging scraps for a nest. And that’s not just me, that’s all of us.
Nobody is born with a favourite record. At some point, we needed to try something new, or everybody would be going on Desert Island Discs and only picking Fisher Price Music. “Yes. I think I would keep Camptown Races…” And even that joke doesn’t work, because you didn’t pick the records that go on the Fisher Price record player. Some toy designer in the 60s did, for you. Everything is curated content. We need to be encouraged to check out weird new stuff from birth. We can’t tell someone to give us what we want, because we don’t know. And if we think we know, that’s dangerous for us. It won’t help us as humans.
Not being interested YET is why I’ll happily click mad links to other people’s interests, if I’m allowed to see them on my social feed past all the stuff the algorithm knows I already like. It’s why I will watch anything called ‘The Secret Life Of The Motorway’ (thanks, early BBC4) knowing that I will learn something amazing about concrete and that I wasn’t looking for that, but now I’m, for a day or two, concrete anecdote guy. A little bit.
The problem with the algorithm is it only knows what we told it. And we only tell it certain things. Zadie Smith noticed, when Facebook first appeared, that it asked users for a favourite album and film and sports team, but not a favourite architect or fragrance or tree. It was asking broad pop culture stuff that its designers – young male college bros – used as character identifiers to gather and reinforce their tribes, but left out loads of other stuff that groups outside that demographic used to define themselves. The data it gathered limited the online existences of its users.
I remember early on with digital streamed TV, working out that I needed to go through all my services and give five stars or a thumbs up to my favourite all time TV shows and movies, otherwise it only knew I liked new stuff. It only had data on what I liked that I’d watched on their service, not what was actually important to me. That’s probably one of the reasons their content algorithms have biased so heavily to new movies and TV, and abandoned any attempts to represent a wider or historical visual culture. Because it doesn’t know we like Brief Encounter and Withnail and I, because we’d already watched them before we signed up. So those sort of things drop off the service, and it just knows we like Game of Thrones and whatever came out last year.
The algorithm knows us… a bit. But only the most recent version of us. And it doesn’t know who we might be next.
The tech dream of turning all content into user-focused content reduces us as people. I suspect that its focus on the things we like and talk about most, not the minor side interests and nine-day wonders, or the stuff we loved deeply but privately before we started using digital services, makes us into obsessive tedious nerds when we’re maybe not as nerdy as that.
If I were feeling slightly uncharitable, I might even suspect that algorithmic content delivery was invented by and for the sort of people who won’t shut up about their one thing. That message board mentality from which social media sprang can be lovely, when we find fellow fans, but limiting if we spend all day furiously arguing with strangers about My Little Pony. Maybe we don’t spot that the algorithm turns us into obsessive super-nerds, because it simulates the feeling of being down the pub with mates you love because they’re also into Blake’s Seven or Leyton Orient. That’s comforting – it’s lovely, it’s human, that’s why we even have tribes – but a very narrow version of that, constantly reinforced at the expense of wider interests, is not always healthy.
You know how the algorithm works with your shopping patterns? Buy a lawnmower, and you’re advertised more lawnmowers, like you’re a lawnmower collector. It’s all it knows about you: in favour of short grass. There’s no option to register wider interests, or even a wider interest in wider interests. And who has the time to educate all our invisible robot butlers?
So it needs to milk the one thing it knows about you. To algorithmic digital capitalism, we are a collaegue from work whom nobody really knows, but there’s a birthday present to be bought, and the choice when you unwrap it makes your heart sink, because at best you find out someone overheard that you like unicorns, so it’s a unicorn every time. Or worst of all it reveals that all anybody has noticed about you is your declared gender or sexuality. Chocolate dicks. Keep Out: Man Cave signs “for your shed, hahahaha”. Cruet sets shaped like tits. Pink crap encrusted with glitter. Top Gear merchandise. Prosecco-themed coasters. Cards with footballers on. It’s that depressing.
I suspect the aspirant state of digital capitalism’s algorithm-driven version of the richness of human culture and curiosity is represented by the sports team gift shop. I’m not a sports fan, but I’ve spent enough at the Warners Studio Tour in Leavesden or Forbidden Planet over my lifetime to know how this works. Every possible product, branded to fit the one thing the shop’s owners knows about you: that you came in because of the sign above the door that named one of your interests.
But if you have everything in your home branded to Ipswich Town FC or Harry Potter that doesn’t make you a rounded person, that makes you a bit of a… weirdo. They’d do a bit on the end of the news about you, surrounded by shelves of ephemera, sitting on your He-Man duvet, cradling a boxed Man At Arms, your hair cut like Prince Adam. If that truly represented you, people would flinch when you sat down at their table in a pub. You would risk being not an engaged fan, but a bore.
That’s not who we should aspire to be. But it’s who its most convenient for algorithmic capitalism to think we are. I wish there was a way to register an interest in… everything.
Can I get that on a t-shirt?