“What I propose is that we break out of the false privacy and security of never sharing our devices, never letting others fuck with our algos. This is not private, nor secure, it actually keeps you more vulnerable to social and informational echo chambers.
I dream of gatherings where we pass our phones around and intentionally survey and augment each other’s algorithms to determine just how personalized our world views via technology have become. Search and like things the original user would not, point out sources of malicious information, cross reference results across various users, keywords and devices, etc. This would not only increase understanding of how differing points of view come to be in the modern era, but it would also jig each participants algorithm or data profile to make them harder to manipulate with targeted ads and propaganda that have been all dressed up in grandmothers clothes to look familiar and harmless.
It started when I stayed at the sea lion man’s home, who, in hindsight, showed every indication of living in a controlled environment. Invited by his roommate to “save me” from the shelter, to catch me in entrapment, a man too twisted for me to ascribe an animal name, so I’ll just call him NFG.
Upon meeting him, in his shack where he ran 4 monitors, more cameras than the ones he kept visible, and tinkered with meth, people and electronics and tried not to seem to be hiding anything, I had jokingly dedicated Tom Waits “What’s He Building In There?”. He fumbled to veil his defense mechanisms upon hearing the peice, as I understand in hindsight that the reference was much more fitting than I had intended it at the time, his face folded as he continued to bluff.
I mentioned Yuval Harari, after hearing him on armchair experts, and NFG became filled with disgust at all he stood for, without really being able to reference what. I was confused, as I was unaware of what of his points could be of such controversy to anyone but perhaps an extremist of some sort or another.
Hoping to catch me doing something he could bust me for and such, NFG would leave me alone in his shop and allowed me to use his computer, albeit while being secretly watched. I mostly just looked up YouTube videos while I cleaned for him, but searching on his algorithm was something unlike any I had seen. It was deeply twisted and it reflected something disturbing not only about him, but about how a man could be coerced into such a horrid headspace… or at least that’s how it seemed from my perspective, influenced by many similar factors, albeit in different directions. A great concern rose over the fact that we were receiving drastically different representations of people, places, events, ideas, words used to represent them, everything the internet touches, but when people speak of such things, we all fall prey to thinking we are discussing the same things, and believing the topic as same, we mistakenly other each other. So much more of our lives is a semantics debate than anyone can seem to see, another example of us drowning in that which we claim to avoid, like conflict, judgement, or trauma.
George Carlin showed up as a crass, half-thought-up, bigot. Everyone I looked at through the lens of NFG appeared different from the version I had come to know in nearly every way *but* appearance. I didn’t like this version of them. It was easy to imagine from the angles he was getting, why he wouldn’t either. But how was the perspective honed in such a fashion? Was he being shown what he wanted to see or what he was wanted to see? What formula fashioned this view and for what purpose, to what end? Why was it so different from anything I had seen? Whose lense is closer to the truth? With only my own esoteric version of a highly vulnerable information system with which to investigate, as to the objective, I am left but to wonder, but every hypothesis poses rather serious consequences at any scale.
The Sea Lion man scoffed at Pete Seeger, dismissing him as though some bro who was just in it for women and liquor. I had thought was the closest thing our community (RIP) had to a Pete Seeger. He was an activist, into trad folk, played the banjo, a good man, cared to be egalitarian and inclusive, what I had attributed to the same figure he had such distaste for. How did he come to have such an antagonistic view of someone I held as a hero? I had pondered if perhaps he was right, but considered all I had seen of Seeger, and that the sea lion man had not seemed to look past the impression that it would seem he had *been shown*. Over the time I was there, he showed advanced symptoms of misinformation, but in my own position in this matter, he would never hear it from me, as I had been represented through similar filters, causing him to see a false version of me, too, and he treated me as what he saw, which was not me, and I did not deserve, despite all his convinced conviction. Pete didn’t deserve it, either. Nor did the countless others. It turns out that once you have said and done enough on the record, people can use those records to make you seem to have done and said just about anything they like. Personalized propaganda, like we’ve never seen it before.
People see the benefits of accurately personalized music and movie suggestions. It is my hope that they do not have to experience accurately personalized torture themselves to see the risks of data collection as it is being and has been poorly conducted and contained.
Algorithms become a terrifying weapon, when you recognize their potential for harmful use, and how that potential has become so normalized that we can both claim to recognize it and simultaneously fail to see it at all.
So, fuck with them, I say.
Disarm them.
Expand the horizons of your screens,
be unpredictable,
chaos is just a pattern that is unknown to the beholder,
Don’t let yourself be personalized into a cage of limiting beliefs
Fuck with each others algorithms.
Fuck with them.
They sure as shit fuck with us.”
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