algorithms and censorship and agency and consent

this is a repost from the cohost times, and explicitly is a short thought I meant to expand further upon. maybe someday I will!

Regarding the latest from Cory Doctorow (though it will be out of date tomorrow, as he writes a terrifying amount every day it seems): https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

While not explicitly about it, this is the first I’ve read of someone that touches on the absolute nightmare that is trying to have any agency around your own consumption on the internet these days. The algorithmic feed, the recommendation tech, the refusal to give me exactly what I ask to see and instead to serve up things that are similar in ways a machine understands but not, usually, in ways that are helpful to me, a human, who wants to keep tabs on their friends’ work or a particular band’s career or that one webcomic or what have you.

Whenever I click an X on something and the website interprets that as me saying “show me less of this” or “snooze this for 30 days” or such shit… it’s hugely disempowering. It contributes to a sort of learned helplessness online, I think. A kind of “fuck it, whatever” attitude because it is so exhausting to constantly be negotiating with platforms to see the things I have subscribed to seeing. Negotiating being the wrong word. Begging has been more the feeling.

And I am ranting about this on a service that promises to never do that to me, and I love it, and that’s a big part of why I’m here, but I know – I know deep in my bones – that I have infinitely more patience for learning new services, wrestling with technical fiddly challenges, weathering bugs and glitches, and – in the case here – of summoning to mind all the markup and css I have learned over a lifetime on the internet, than the majority of the people I care about.

So I’m pretty interested in there being some pushback against The Algorithm as a way to experience the digital world, for many of the same reasons mentioned in that link above, but also because I really do believe it removes users’ ability to properly consent to what they experience by measures that they can understand. And that can and will destroy their relationship with the internet.