John Singer Sargent: Sketch of Sir Edward John Poynter (Aug 5 1913)

"…cursing TheAlgorythm every inch of the way to nowhere again. And again."

If a common villain emerges from everyone’s scrolling stories, it’s undoubtedly TheAlgorythm. This mysterious presence is said to make the decisions about what any odd accessor might see in their social media feed. It doesn’t matter which individual feed gets mentioned, its underlying algorythm gets blamed for choosing what’s presented for our obsessive/compulsive perusal. This seems perfectly justified if only because TheAlgorythm works in such mysterious ways. It’s said to do this or that, indifferent to any user’s underlying needs. It feeds upon what it needs first, last, and, reportedly, always. It seems to operate well beyond reason, far beyond any logical justification. Not randomly, though its operation might sometimes easily be mistaken for random generation. It appears to operate more randomly than random could, and probably does. It’s a black box with whatever anyone might imagine operating inside.

It serves up a curious mix of frustration and satisfaction. Sometimes, it seems to read a user’s mind, delivering something eerily prescient. “Just when I was thinking about buying some new shoes, TheAlgorythm delivered a targeted ad touting precisely the sort of shoe I had been considering.” Other times, it just frustrates its user’s intention, like when it seems to hide a once-reliable feed that said user had grown addicted to accessing. Those times, it can be infuriating.

Notice how I refer to it as though it were an actual ‘it,’ instead of some disembodied presence? It sure seems to hold intent, however mysterious. I think of it as like an Oracle of Delphi. Nobody really needs a predictable oracle; otherwise, why bother? The response should at least surprise if it can’t reassure. It should be capable of shocking, too, but not every time. It should seem remarkably stupid at least as often as it seems insightful, so the user can occasionally feel like its superior. It works like a Magic Eight Ball, except it holds more than the typical fifteen different responses. Some days, it responds quite differently from how it responds on other days. Overall, TheAlgorythm seems remarkably unreliable, a paragon of pitiful programming.

Zuckerberg or Musk is thought to be their master. They stand accused of designing the odd behaviors that somehow serve advertisers, first and foremost. The users, from whom data gets extracted, play a role somewhat south of lab rats. They engage in efforts they cannot and need not imagine. They believe themselves to be surfing on their own volition, but they hold little influence over which waves they’re served or where sharks might be hidden. They, we, serve as flotsam. That we willingly submit to this role seems astounding to anyone not bitten by the bug. Nobody who’s never been immersed in TheAlgorythm’s world could possibly comprehend the attraction, the seemingly mutually assured distraction, involved.

It’s very unpredictability, curiously, might be its underlying magic. It insults each user with impunity, yet the vast majority return, enthusiastically. We might threaten to delete the application responsible for delivering these never-ending insults to our dignity and intelligence, but we manufacture lame excuses faster and in greater volumes than The Algorythm abuses us. Proper rulers should sometimes seem like unruly adolescents, if only to keep those peons on their toes. And make no mistake, we users are peons in these vast and mysterious commercial enterprises. We can’t imagine how or why they’re managing to make money off our innocuous, barely conscious actions. We know we never pay attention to the advertising TheAlgorythm serves up to us, or we very rarely ever do. We scream when our video gets interrupted five times by some fragment of an utterly unintelligible piece of apparent advertising. We put our heads down and continue surfing, cursing TheAlgorythm every inch of the way to nowhere again. And again.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz