Algorithms Fake Serendipity
On un-squishing the little things.
I recently came across the work of Sam Selvon, whose stories about Windrush-Era immigrants to the UK convey a great sense of ennui and dislocation while also having a great sense of humour. His characters, although ordinary and flawed people; are drawn sympathetically and with great love and care. Moses Aloetta, Cap and Tanty are now characters who form an important part of my personal pantheon; as a writer, it is entirely possible that their influence might affect the characters that I come up with in the future.
No algorithm recommended The Lonely Londoners to me and I hadn't heard about it before. I simply saw it on a bookshelf without any advertising and it spoke to me in a way that a good book ought to do. When I started reading it, I knew that there was nothing else I should to be doing instead. For someone raised in the cradle of the internet, this simple moment of serendipity was a rare and powerful thing—after years of being spoon-fed a simulacra of such a moment by a bunch of for-profit computer systems, to feel the real thing again felt like a sure step out of Plato's cave.
Algorithms fake serendipity. They make it seem as if the informational diet you are consuming has been curated "For You" when it is actually the product of a commercial exercise to extract as much attention from you as possible. They want to feed you as much crap as you can stomach without switching off. It would be tempting to assume that when good recommendations are made it is purely by luck, but the system is designed to trickle them at the rates that are most likely to keep you hooked. "Serendipity" is a utility that the platforms can turn on at will through various design choices. These algorithms could provide you with better recommendations but there is no guarantee that these would be the most profitable content for advertisers. They could also become 100% slop (like Instagram reels) if the people in charge believe the audience to be credulous enough. Either extreme is usually suboptimal, so they give you something like 95% slop with 5% good stuff. That good stuff seems sort of like good luck, like resonance, like serendipity but it is not. It is controlled and it is rationed for no other reason than to enrich the platform owners. This gradually tends to get worse over time, leading to a gradual Enshittification of the platform.
One wonders, how many quietly fulfilling moments have been silenced by the unending cacophony of this digital taste-mill? How many little discoveries have been quashed and replaced by some flat replica of the feeling? Of all the ways that the internet has flattened us, this one struck me as rather sad. Yes, other things like the transactionalisation of dating and the Dickensian gig economy are substantially more evil; but the simplest losses are perhaps the easiest to get your head around. To have lost little moments of emergent happening is a more weighty sting to the individual than any grand economic disruption. It is like how when you are writing about something heavy, the small details and little gestures are what actually hit the reader—especially when the events themselves feel impenetrable and incomprehensible.
Reclaiming these moments is simple—you just have to switch off. Cast aside your earphones and leave your laptop at home. Go rummage, go ramble, go wandering off. Follow leads spontaneously. It really is that simple. You may be wary at first but the anxiety fades quite fast. For more on how to be rid of that, I'd point you to my prior piece on the value of a certain kind of learnt Naivete.
Those little moments are radicalising, little sparks that make you realise how much of your life they have taken and just how much of it is left for you to live. It is natural to resent it because it is risible that you have been enclosed like that. However, it is hard to stay angry for too long when you find yourself in a cafe, reading a good book that came without a recommendation.
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I love this 🙏 beautiful writing and poignant subject. Thank you for drawing attention to these small, but significant losses, and suggesting how we might prevent them.
I recently read My Friends by Frederik Backman because I heard a thought provoking interview with him on a podcast. Then, while perusing a local bookshop, I came across another novel titled My Friends, this time by Hisham Matar. I bought it because I wondered how two books with the same title would compare. This chain of serendipity led me to one of the best books I’ve read in a long time and characters that will enter my ‘personal pantheon’ as you put it 😊. I’m now going to read everything by Hisham Matar, and The Lonely Londoners too!
Excellent article. Well done