Men often give their vehicles female names and personalities, but I have already written a column about that. This time I’m writing about algorithms.
Humans anthropomorphize things. That means we project human characteristics and personalities onto things that aren’t human. It is just something we do. It even makes a certain sense with animals, especially mammals. They are living beings with needs, nervous systems and group hierarchies similar to our own. It isn’t hard to see a sympathetic echo of our own emotions and behaviors in that of a dog, horse, dolphin or ape.
It gets stranger when we anthropomorphize tools, machines and in our increasingly digital world, programs. These things are not alive, but our minds imbue them with the illusion of life, personality and motivation. There is also a Dr. Frankenstein and his monster relationship at work, by which I mean an adversarial relationship.
A horse or donkey is a living thing with instincts and desires that has been trained to do a job. It is understandable, perhaps even expected that it will not always behave nor do its job perfectly. A car or bicycle is built for an express purpose. When it doesn’t fulfill its function or worse, breaks, it isn’t just rebellion. It is betrayal!
Lately it amuses me to anthropomorphize the algorithms on social media desperately trying to sell me things. I know it is just a collection of code. It doesn’t know me from Adam and doesn’t really care if I buy anything or not. After all, I’m just one target consumer out of billions— but it thinks it knows me. Rather it thinks it knows my behavior as a consumer.
In a petty, knee-jerk reaction to what has seemed like a veritable explosion of ads in my feed, I started closing every ad I saw. Just a quick flick of the thumb that costs me nothing and a message dutifully displays, telling me I will not be shown that ad again. Note that it does not promise I will not see any ads again. The whole point of social media is to sell stuff to the rubes— I mean, customers.
You can be guaranteed yet another ad lies in wait not very far down in your feed.
I close that one too and the one after it. It doesn’t matter if it is something I might like, might need or might have previously purchased, I close it. Ad after ad, shut down before my eyes can even fully process what I am seeing.
The algorithm started getting desperate!
Now, I know it doesn’t feel anything, not really, but that was how my brain chose to anthropomorphize its behavior and I chuckled darkly as the ads got a lot more random.
At first it was pushing things a man in my demographic and geographical region might reasonably purchase: vehicles, insurance, insurance for your vehicles and so on. After the hundredth or so closed ad, the poor algorithm was throwing everything, including the kitchen sink (from Kohler!), at me in an effort to figure out something I might be interested in buying.
Pet food, vacations, blue jeans, movies, books, telescopes, wheels of cheese, yard signs, candy bars, tickets to stand up comedy shows, pianos, English muffins, video games, HVAC units, diet pills, cutlery, seeds for gardening, magazine subscriptions, home delivery groceries, energy drinks, yarn, vintage posters, espresso machines, credit cards, cosmetic surgery and well, you get the point.
Some of the suggestions were so off base and unhinged it brought a smile to my lips. It pleased me to imagine the algorithm angry and out of breath, a bead of sweat running down its brow, angrily gasping, “Will you just buy something already!”
In libertarian circles, especially online, it is popular to tell others to “become ungovernable.” I think I like “become unmarketable”, as in “we don’t know how to market the product to this person”, much better. We have recently seen plenty of billionaire technocrats gleefully buying out and tearing up our democracy— but they’ll never stop trying to sell you something.
