THE ALGORITHM IS EATING US ALIVE

I have fallen into a deep depression that has only been exacerbated by the algorithmically mediated nature of social media. While the deletion of such apps is presented as the answer; the bright and sheening North Star in the midnight sky, this difficulty is more pronounced for those who primarily communicate with friends and family through social media platforms. And even more difficult in a world that practically pushes technology on you from every corner, in every advertisement you notice. Want to apply for a job? Try Indeed. Need to send a parcel? Here’s your scannable QR code. Want to order food to your door? Here’s this handy little app that gets you a hot, steaming bowl of ramen in 35 minutes (time you could’ve been using to cook a meal, but that’s beside the point) so you don’t have to go into the rain, delivered by our special minimum wage cyclists! Trying to get over a five-year relationship that ruined your ability to love again? Try filling that void with a seven-month ‘situationship’ that sets off a yearlong depressive episode, courtesy of Hinge™. Need to break a cycle of generational trauma or two? Scrap a long, arduous NHS waiting list and try a session with one of our soulless BetterHelp therapists! Better yet, listen to this sponsored podcast episode about attachment styles – I think it might get you to intellectualise more about how your self worth is contingent on getting a text back!

There is a far-reaching surplus of information, supposedly ‘awareness’ that is inconsequential as inaction. Your sole motivation is to engage with slop till your brain collapses and thus begins the sequential dopamine feedback loop, you’re supposed to fiend for it again, and that’s only half of the equation. AI is mincing everything artists post and incorporating it into the algorithm and baking it into a shit-fuck pie. AI is corrupting everything. There are ‘wellness’ influencers telling you to cut out gluten or entire food groups if the algorithm detects you’re prone to some momentary bloating, or you have ‘neurodivergent’ influencers telling you you could be autistic if you sleep with T-Rex arms. Maybe there are spiritual ‘gurus’ telling you that you should be authentic while they broadcast their every movement from Earth to Mars. For all you know, there could be sanctimonious poets orchestrating the worst haikus known to man yet algorithmically charm the pants off the heartbroken. Your identity is no longer yours. Advertisers and analysts have conquered and catapulted the souls and hearts of humans into lava. You are to be labelled. You are to be pathologized. You are to be reduced to this taxonomy. You are a speck of dirt in their abundance of data. History will remember the infographic you posted to your story! The surveillance never fucking ends. And it will never end, even if you turn off every tracking service that’s enabled on every app; even if you start using a VPN; even if you start going under a pseudonym, you cannot escape a wider digital system that claims to know you; the same one that has your credit cards on file, that knows the kind of shops you browse; that knows your favourite video game, or your political allegiance. It doesn’t matter what you do because it will follow you to death unless you furiously scrub away all dimensions of your digital footprint in its entirety. Still, you can do all that, and someone will probably have a screenshot from 2015 of a disparaging tweet you made about Oasis.

Funnily enough, the subject of the algorithm has made me pontificate on how the art of the ‘meme’ is dying, all of the humour has been punctured and drained out of it, and I can’t help but ponder if this is closely related to recessionary habits. Suddenly, it looks as if the contemporary way of communicating most, if not all human experiences, presentation of self and interpersonal behaviours are chronicled and captured encyclopedically online through a range of multi-media depictions: a screenshot of someone’s AI-generated ‘sad chronically online i’m just a girl-core’ Spotify daylist filled with Elliott Smith and Radiohead with the words “Who want me” over it; a sardonic Wojak meme; overly earnest typography; or a self-aware declaration of one’s self-destructive tendencies. Memes are no longer a simplified template or digested in two-minute YouTube videos from 2008, they have transformed into a way of documenting everyone’s inner monologues. I can’t quite explain the shift, but there was a turning point from how memes were perceived as a silly Vine or YouTube clips in viral circulation every few months to becoming an oversaturation of overly indulgent narration and monologuing. It seems like the unending and uneasy awareness that we are being surveilled at every moment is dimming a sense of wit and whimsy, and turning people into commodified and diluted versions of themselves. YOU ARE NO LONGER YOU - YOU ARE A BRAND. Your uniqueness, your idiosyncrasies, your quirks, the little things that make you - YOU! That’s not you, that’s symptomatic of Cluster-B/Autism/ADHD diagnostic criteria from the DSM-5. ACTUALLY. Because at least if you frame it that way, it is palatable to the algorithm. And by then, at the height of your Influencerdom, you can start selling a package of ten master classes for £350 and make bank from the spiritually confused.

What’s even more omnipresent is the Manic-Pixie-Dreamification of traits associated with neurodevelopmental disabilities, as well as mental illness and trauma. Unpacking this begins with the acknowledgement that some insular online communities adopt a very ‘noble savage’ approach by maintaining a dichotomised thinking of autistic/allistic people, and end up butchering terminology e.g. ‘neurotypical’ and warping its definition to mean ‘normie’ (or an Ed Sheeran fan). It ends up becoming dehumanising and unhelpful as if they are just ‘NPCs’ or co-workers who have no interiority or complex thoughts of their own while autistic people are homogenised as a group of verbal, highly empathetic savants. This promotes a mythological framing of the struggles of autistic people, reducing their behaviours to ‘quirkiness’ and it ends up preserving the existing status quo rather than actively challenging it, funnelling it back into an algorithm that relies on generative data spanning your engagement and trending topics to feed the brain slop. Subsequently, surveillance has worsened the pathologisation of ‘socially deviant’ behaviours, its grip on the digital panopticon leads to a (potentially misguided) user developing a heightened self-consciousness of their flagrant taboos of social code, only leading to a desperate yearning for a taxonomy that could adequately describe their woes. Ultimately this framing is patronising and romanticises the condition, neglecting the devastatingly negative impacts that disabilities can have on people and treating it as a ‘marketable’ condition. By focusing on the ‘desirability’ of certain traits and sanitising the disabling aspects of a condition, you cannot call yourself an advocate or an ‘activist’. Consequently, it only ends up forming division and bigotry, instead of educating, creating awareness, and working towards dismantling neuronormativity and ableism altogether.

At the end of the day, I am reminded this could all be escaped from if I just threw my phone in the ocean. That would be cool too. I engage with the algorithm a lot less these days but it still finds ways to annoy me. I feel like whenever I’m on the Internet, it’s like pretending to get a joke you don’t get because I still don’t entirely understand it and I probably never will. It is difficult to comprehend the mindless consumerism of everything especially experiences that are meant to be understood and lived freely. I hate that everyone has gotten obsessed with labelling and the futile misconception of every perceived social/cultural deviation as a micro-category under the guise of '“progressiveness”. The divisiveness only serves the algorithm, it only seeks to perpetuate the commodification of ourselves and fuels the algorithmically driven echo chamber in its journey to retrieve as much data about you as possible. Why don’t we just abolish all that shit and get weird with it under communism?