Annotations
How many times have I agreed, mindlessly, to something the Internet tells me about myself?
As I see it, the algorithm seems to take your most toxic traits (maybe you have a tendency to ghost people, or maybe you push them away) and keeps showing them back to you through people who normalize them until you end up normalizing them too.
Just like you are what you eat and who you hang out with, you are what you pay attention to.
No matter who you are, algorithms will always show you negative things—on a smaller or larger scale. Ragebait, tragedies, or constant reminders of insecurities you might actually relate to, you can never truly escape.Negativity sells. Negativity makes you pay attention, so that’s what you get.
I realized that in the periods of my life when I use one social media platform more than others, I become a slightly different person. When I use X a lot, I get angrier. I start thinking negatively about everything: certain celebrities I shouldn’t care about, and trivial things that wouldn’t normally cross my mind suddenly make me feel sick.
When I use TikTok and Instagram a lot, I start caring more about really superficial things: trends, new clothes, celebrity gossip, and other people’s dating lives. I get horrible FOMO, and I feel bad about my life after seeing so many amazing travels, people visiting places I can only afford to dream about.
When I go through Substack Notes, I end up with this feeling, that is very visible in my long-form posts, of ‘Oh, fuck the Internet. Fuck social media. I would much rather go to a retreat in the woods. I am a fucking intellectual.’ I forget that the world is so much more than Sylvia Plath quotes, ‘thought daughters’, and Carrie Bradshaw pictures.
And even though I can’t deny that the algorithm has helped me find some gems, I miss when things felt more organic. When we were a curation of the things we liked, not a dumpster of daily overstimulation, consuming content we can’t even store inside ourselves.
So, no. I don’t ‘hate’ the algorithm because it is a reflection of who I am.I hate it because it has the power to manipulate the kind of person I could become.