Not My Algorithm

I want to be careful here, because the easy way to make this point is wrong. Recommendation systems are not evil. They are not watching you in the way people imagine. Most of the time they are not even especially mysterious: they notice what people who behaved like you did next, and they offer you that.

It is a useful thing to have. It is also a strange thing to live inside.

The tension is not that the guess is bad. The tension is that the guess is good enough. A wrong recommendation is easy to refuse. One that is roughly right, most days, is the one that quietly takes over, because refusing it costs effort and accepting it costs nothing at all.

And what it has of you is narrower than it looks. It has what you clicked. It does not have what you meant, what you regretted, what you were avoiding, or who you were sitting with. It holds your behavior and none of your reasons. Then it hands the behavior back to you as though it were your taste.

Do that for long enough and something inverts. You stop being a person the system is describing and start being a person the system is completing. Not because anyone manipulated you. Because you kept agreeing.

Not My Algorithm is not a refusal to use any of it. It is a refusal to accept the description. What is predicted for you is a summary of what you have already done, and a summary of the past is a poor guide to what you should do next, because everything you have not tried yet is missing from it by definition.

The practical version of this is unglamorous. Read something nobody sent you. Finish a thing you are not enjoying, or abandon one you are, on your own judgment rather than on a rating. Choose badly on purpose sometimes. A person who never surprises the system is not being served by it.

The feed is a good tool and a bad map. It can show you where people like you have already been. It cannot show you anywhere you have not gone.