Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker puts a name to something I’ve felt for many years while attempting to navigate the pervasive recommendation machines of the internet: algorithmic anxiety. As he relays in the article:

“I’ve been on the internet for the last 10 years and I don’t know if I like what I like or what an algorithm wants me to like,” Peter wrote. She’d come to see social networks’ algorithmic recommendations as a kind of psychic intrusion, surreptitiously reshaping what she’s shown online and, thus, her understanding of her own inclinations and tastes. “I want things I truly like not what is being lowkey marketed to me,” her letter continued.

…

Peter’s dilemma brought to my mind a term that has been used, in recent years, to describe the modern Internet user’s feeling that she must constantly contend with machine estimations of her desires: algorithmic anxiety. Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are.

Personally, this means being afraid to ever ‘dislike’ anything on Netflix or YouTube, with the fear that anything remotely related will now be banished forever from reaching me, or hesitating to like even the most enjoyable clips only to be inundated with identical clones. I’ve begun listening to mid-tempo synth music as background while working, and though I still prefer energetic indie rock, Spotify has now almost completely shifted its picture of my tastes toward retro paradise vibes. It’s now become a side job simply to manage a computer-generated picture of who I am and what interests me.

What are your strategies for optimizing how the machine will predict your tastes?

Are you doing a good job managing them? Are they delivering as a result?

What are the best examples of the algorithm nailing it for you, or totally missing the mark?

What are your alternative discovery methods to get out from the yoke of a digitally dictated taste profile?

Inspired by this lovely little visual essay (only partially screen-capped above) about the need to cool down social media, and maybe make it harder to instantly reach millions of people any time you want, a simple tangent:

Should there be limits on how easy it is to “go viral” or have your message spread globally in seconds?

Do we really need that ability? If so, why?

If not, what’s a fair but useful way to limit that power without old-fashioned corporate gatekeeping?

Tap twice to heart this post. #cinefile #nofilter #bestlife

My frustration at not seeing Ingrid Goes West sooner is matched only by my delight at having finally done so. Aubrey Plaza, whom I love (Parks & Rec!), plays unhinged one moment, socially awkward the next better than anyone else I can think of (have you seen Legion!?). The knowing portrayal of a certain type of California social media bohemian by Elizabeth Olsen manages both pinpoint accuracy and razor parody.

But the way the writers/director/cast refrain from fully picking a side makes this movie special. They could have fallen into the trap of stalker movie cliché pretty easily, and this could have ended at bad melodrama. Lonely weird girl tries way too hard to befriend internet obsession, craziness ensues.

Instead, this film shows sympathy for Ingrid. She’s not well, ok, but she really just wants some friends. Meanwhile Olsen’s Taylor is no innocent; she’s manipulative, insincere, and most of all a hollow mask of perfection. Her social media life cries out for constant attention, asks for you to “follow” her, to “feel” like her friend along for the perfectly bourgeois ride. But then Taylor the person pushes away anyone who gets too close if they’re not good for her diligently curated “brand”.

Ingrid suffers from depression and could get better, though the film’s ending suggests otherwise. Taylor, on the other hand, will likely only ever get worse. If that’s the case, who’s the real villain?

Are social media influencers monsters?

Do they sort of have to be to become one in the first place?

Is it possible to befriend someone you start off following on the internet, or with someone who starts off following you?

The spikiest speech bubbles usually have the fewest strong points.

It’s a fascinating paradox: we live in a time with the easiest means to disseminate ideas that humans have ever had access to, and yet so much about the free exchange of ideas seems to be getting worse, not better. The supposed truisms simply aren’t holding up.

Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?

This article (the whole thing is illuminating) touches on what may be the single biggest obstacle to widespread progress in today’s world. In order for an exchange of ideas, we have to be willing and able to trade beyond our (self-imposed, largely digital/media-based) borders.

Since “more speech” alone doesn’t seem to be helping… what might actually help the best ideas win out?

What changes to how our biggest platforms operate could help achieve those goals?

On the blockchain, everybody can securely verify you’re a dog, without knowing which dog.

In an article I’d highly recommend about the potential of blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, author Steven Johnson is more excited about the further possibilities of decentralization than he is about new ways to send money.

For example, our personal Social Graphs are currently tethered to places like Twitter or Facebook, who own the lists of our follows/friends that define our experience on social media. But what if, for example, those connections were made through an open standard we could port to any service?

Perhaps someday, every single person on the planet might use that standard to map their social connections, just as every single person on the internet uses TCP/IP to share data. But even if this new form of identity became ubiquitous, it wouldn’t present the same opportunities for abuse and manipulation that you find in the closed systems that have become de facto standards. I might allow a Facebook-style service to use my social map to filter news or gossip or music for me, based on the activity of my friends, but if that service annoyed me, I’d be free to sample other alternatives without the switching costs.

In that world, the list of people you know, news outlets you read, celebrities you are interested in, etc., could be your own. Then you could lay any type of software on top of that to interact with all those things how you saw fit. You could build all manner of new social networks using the underlying connection data, from scratch, without having to convince everyone else to switch to the new platform to make it work.

If you were to build a new social network from the ground up, how would it be different from what we use today?

How could these new social networks avoid some of the pitfalls of the ones we have now?