Algorithms in the real world
a la Kool-Aid Man
On Thursday night, we went over to a nearby concert hall to see this band called Petey. I suppose Petey is probably the name of the guy, I don’t know. I should know because A.) he’s my favorite band at the moment and B.) he lives pretty damn close to us. Like, we see him at the brewery sometimes.
It was a great show. Definitely a top five for me. Ninety, maybe a hundred people in this high-ceilinged space with plenty of room to breathe and a friendly little pit right in the center of the stage — not a real mosh situation, more like an aggressive conga line. And the whole thing has this intimate feel to it. Everybody, all ninety of us total strangers, know all the words to all the songs and we’re all singing along.
And, at the beginning of the encore, I catch this really ethereal vibe. Petey comes out with the smoke machines blasting behind him and lights from the bottom of the stage going thick pink-and-purple through the smoke. He’s outlined sharply against the haze of the stage and it’s viscerally three-dimensional.
A concert is a dopamine bomb anyway but this moment really kisses me on the mouth. One of those moments where staged beauty comes along and knocks you on your ass. And when that happens, you (or maybe it’s just me) wonder something like: wow, how the hell did I get here?
And the answer, almost undeniably, is algorithms.
I don’t know how I stumbled across Petey but, more likely than not, it was an algorithm. He came up on my Spotify Discover playlist or one of his videos popped up on YouTube. And, you know, I got into him. And I’d be willing to bet that at least half of the people at that concert were there because of an algorithm.
This is how we discover music now (and for the foreseeable future). Sure, you hear the new Taylor Swift song on the radio, but you’re not really discovering new bands on the radio anymore. An algorithm is feeding them to you. And as Petey was up there on stage outlined against the haze, it struck me that this moment was an instance of the algorithms breaking through into the real world. Kind-of like a digital Kool-Aid Man.
Algorithms are how we discover the world. Or at least how we color it. Books, I suppose, might be the exception. I get books from word-of-mouth1 or you know, some writer I like mentions a book they like in an interview. Books just come along.
But music, television, news — all that’s determined by algorithms. January 6th was the result of a lot terrible people and ideologies but you wouldn’t be too off-base if you were to blame the insurrection on the radicalizing us-vs-them Facebook/YouTube algorithms that have boiled our American brains in the past decade. And, like the Petey concert, January 6th was an instance of the algorithms busting, a la Kool-Aid Man, into the real world.
To be honest, I don’t even know what an algorithm is. Like, I couldn’t explain it to you. I’m pretty sure it’s got something to do with coding and math. But that’s about as far as I’ve gotten and as far as I care to get. I’m fine with believing algorithms to be magic formulas that lurk behind the scenes, determining the background colors of our lives.
And my algorithms are screwed anyway. I’ve got a two-year-old. The internet will tell you a lot of things about having kids but nobody ever mentions what a toddler will do to your algorithms. My Spotify Discover playlist used to be filled with incredible music. It was all stuff by trendy new indie and tropical house bands. (Again, that’s probably where I discovered Petey).
But now it’s all godawful lite country (my son is obsessed with ‘Life is a Highway’ by Rascal Flatts) and Disney sing-a-longs. And my YouTube algorithm. My god, my YouTube algorithm. I used to get suggestions for new surf films or football highlights or stand-up bits. Now it’s almost entirely Ms. Rachel or Brain Candy TV or Monster Jam.
Not that I really care about my algorithms being cooked by my two-year-old. It’s just kind-of funny. You don’t think about that when you have kids. And all they tell you when you pick up your newborn human being from the hospital is ‘don’t give him honey for the first year’.
But really, the vernacular here is what’s tripping me up here. My algorithms. It sounds a bit pretentious. But this isn’t just me — this is how we talk. Where do we get off on calling them my algorithms? As if they belong to each of us. As if they define us. Then again, maybe they do. Your Instagram page is an algorithm and your YouTube and your Google searches and probably even your Apple Maps. All of it is algorithms. And all of it right there in the background, coloring your world. And every once in a while, it pulls a Kool-Aid Man and comes busting into reality. We just have to hope they don’t all get together and fuck everything up.
I’m one of those people who, if I meet somebody else who reads, I’ll immediately be like what book have you loved lately? And hell, I’ll give anything a shot. Last week, I read a Don Winslow thriller.