Machine Anxiety or Why I Should Close TikTok–But Don’t

"We are constantly negotiating with the pesky figure of the algorithm, unsure how we would have behaved if we’d been left to our own devices. No wonder we are made anxious"

- "Our algorithmic self may or may not be faithful to how we see ourselves, but it has just as many dimensions and secrets."

- "the concrete practices of the tech industry now structure identity and individuality in ways that support its own hegemony. While it presents endless avenues for expression, it sees us as wholly reducible to market logic, where we are real to the degree that our consumption habits are rational. This vision of selfhood promotes uniformity and bou... See more

It’s not just that we are being mined for information. I believe this algorithmic catering to our private desires only serves to make us trust each other less. We live in a self-perpetuating social cycle where the more time we spend as isolated individuals consuming algorithmically-curated culture, the more we trust algorithms over each other.

5. Algorithmic feeds are failing: StumbleUpon helped me start to understand, almost at a humanistic level, how vast the internet could be. TikTok often yields a similar result, though with a key difference. On TikTok, almost all videos trend toward a kind of visual consistency and repeatability. Silly voices or bits of speech become ‘sounds’, to be... See more

Sometimes it can feel like the online spaces you spend time in are working against you, pushing you toward things that their owners value instead of what you value—and harnessing your energy to fuel the very things you hate. Like me, you probably know the feeling of spending too much time gorging on digital junk food, wasting precious moments of yo... See more