Slave to the 'rithm
Grace Jones knew. Back in 1985.
I was reading The open internet is still magical by
when Grace Jones’ 1985 classic Slave to the Rhythm played from my Spotify queue. Fresh after reading Seth’s injunction that “magic can happen without social media … on the old-fashioned web” it really struck a chord. (Couldn’t resist that.)Slave to the Rhythm, Slave to the Algorithm.
Today, we find ourselves in a world where most people mostly consume information served to them from the walled gardens of the dominant social media apps. Fantastically rich men, at fantastically profitable corporations, decide what we should be interested in and what should be obscured from us. Their algorithm feeds us and we gulp it down, with sides of propaganda, adverts and misinformation.
Nobody ever searched for “people I don’t know, cocking-up their wedding dance” or “cars, nearly but not actually crashing” or “the same life improvement quotes I have seen a million times but with different, twee backgrounds”. But somehow our feeds are full of this shit and people watch and share it. Compulsively.
Never stop the action, oh
Keep it up, keep it up
Never stop the action
Come on, keep it up
When we have the need to actively look for information, not passively consume it, we venture, like bold explorers, out into the internet proper. The old fashioned web, as Seth calls it. But we don’t really do we? No, mostly we take the easy and comfortable option and just feed another algorithm.
Google transitioned from being a simple index to a complex, opaque arbiter of intent - and along the way became our default home page and a verb. For a long time now, we haven’t searched for something, we’ve “googled” it.
We type into the search bar and feed the hungry mouth of someone else’s algorithm. Different fantastically rich men, at a different fantastically profitable corporation, decide what we want and what we shouldn’t have. The store of all mankind’s accumulated knowledge is out there for us, but we take what we are given.
As
says, in his post lamenting the the enshittification of Google search: “These days, you have to scroll an entire page to find the first result that wasn't sponsored, gamed or put there by Google itself.”A huge industry exists to game social media feeds and Google search rankings. Dark arts are practised by SEO experts and fortunes spent on their services. Children labour in third-world sweatshops, clicking and linking and following and liking and subscribing and commenting. “Influencers” prostitute themselves to businesses desperate to cut through the noise. Marketing people sweat over keywords and the endless creation of inane “content”.
Even Joe and Josephine public have volunteered for the work. Staging practical jokes in their kitchens to share in short video clips. Sharing the embarrassing moments of family and friends caught on camera. Forwarding the latest memes to “go viral” - hopefully before their friends get chance to.
Work to the rhythm
Live to the rhythm
Love to the rhythm
Slave to the rhythm
Everyone has ended up working for the algorithms. Either on screen, as a creator and consumer and sharer and clicker on adverts, or at a keyboard, desperately trying to please the almighty code - to be rewarded with a brief and transient appearance in “the feed”.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and I get the feeling that more and more people are re-evaluating their relationship with social media.
They are realising that they have been fooled into working another job when they thought they were relaxing and socialising. That scrolling in their lunch break is just working a different job for a different corporation.
And they don’t like being a slave to the algorithm.