Surrendering to the Algorithm
... without losing your soul
There was a brief moment, during the first wave of reality TV, when it looked like Andy Warhol’s line about how "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" was coming true. Big Brother required no talent and featured normal people so maybe we’d all get our moment in the spotlight. Alas, the reality of reality TV was more like bear baiting than social experiment, so the only people who ended up appearing were damaged narcissists.
There was another moment, during the first wave of social media, when it looked like Momus’s line about how "in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people" was coming true. LiveJournal, in particular, seemed to be a place for communities of writers to amuse each other without worrying about superstardom. Inevitably, though, some people started to attract exponentially larger audiences, leaving the rest feeling inadequate.
Nowadays, if you ask teenagers what they want to be, they don’t say fireman or teacher. They don’t even say pop star or actor. They want to be an influencer or, if they are hardworking, a YouTuber. They want people give them money and things just for posting images of themselves on Instagram. They understand that having an audience is the key to opening up all other opportunities.
In the twentieth century your only route to fame was to get a record deal or an agent, someone who could convince the gatekeepers whose tastes shaped the global media diet to make you a star. Now, you can study social media to see, precisely, what types of content attracts eyeballs and optimize for that. Talent is somewhat arbitrary, it’s how hard you grind and how well you hack the algorithm that matters.
Mr Beast, the world's most watched YouTuber, spent his youth working out what combination of title, image and video would get viewer engagement that would get the algorithm to feature him. Here is a video of him counting for 24 hours that went viral early on.
Then there’s hip hop sensation Lil Nas X who spent his youth running accounts that repurposed viral content to make it go superviral on Twitter. Until such accounts were banned, they would just steal content and see what lit up people's brains. It seems that if you want to be famous your first job is to not to learn how to play guitar but learn how to play the algorithm. I wonder how much his videos and songs are based on this insight into the viral.
The great danger with this situation is that our personalities get warped by the engagement metrics of a few Silicon Valley nerds. I see girls walking around caked in make-up to resemble Kim Kardashian or whoever is the latest mimetic model they aspire to look like. The world becomes more pornographic because we click and linger on things that light up the lizard brain. Political discourse becomes pure tribalism, lowest common denominator slurs to rouse your troops into action.
For most people the algorithm is a way of acknowledging that time is limited—they only want to see the important stuff. On Facebook and Instagram there can be wildly divergent numbers of likes depending on what kind of keywords you include. Anything to do with babies, funerals, weddings, or new jobs will be instantly featured. Anything that takes people off the platform to, say, your amazing new Substack will be buried.
My preferred social media platform is Twitter because it’s the only one that allows you to choose to see the stream of posts from the people you follow in chronological order without filtering or rearranging. Every other network is based around their algorithm and that algorithm is designed to increase engagement in order to sell advertising.
Twitter is the most open of the platforms: you can reply to and be retweeted by anyone. This is not a walled garden, it’s the wild west. Posting to Twitter is like playing a fruit machine: most of the time you get nothing but occasionally everything lines up and you hit the jackpot.
The key thing is not to be attached to any particular outcome, but to treat it all like an experiment. As Jakob Greenfeld says:
Social media can be a game that you can use to learn, make connections, share your message, and be entertained. I particularly like social media as a kind of intellectual sketch pad, a place to jot down ideas and see what has traction. Let’s play!
