Such an illuminating experience, of getting into painting my nails while recovering from a brain injury and watching my entire algorithmic demographics be reassigned on youtube and completely different stuff being put in front of me because of it ultimately presenting an entirely different view of the world and what "everyone is talking about" and what "everyone believes."
There was a young adult novel that came out when I was a teenager called Feed by M.T Anderson that was a cautionary tale about algorithmic recommendations and how a system that tries to predict what we want and show it to us will ultimately end up shaping us into people who want things it thinks we will like, since that is what we will be exposed to. The Mere Exposure Effect is a phenomenon that has been observed where just seeing something enough times makes you like it more. Mere Exposure is one of the fundamentals of modern marketing where the ads don't seem to be about anything but making you pay attention while the product appears in any capacity at all.
I think we are living in the Feed future. I decided to get back into painting my nails and searched "How you paint your nails" on YouTube, which got me watching a bunch of Simply Nailogical and Kelli Marissa. The algorithm reassigned me to white cisgender heterosexual feminine girl aged 16 to 30 and now I am constantly exposed to fashion, makeup, "deinfluencing," "trend reactions," and far less often am I encountering left wing video essays about the necessity of global militaristic revolution.
Because I have type 2c hair and eczema, I often have times where the algorithm temporarily mistakes me for a Black woman and suddenly all of my ads change. It's always very surreal whenever it happens. It's like I am given a brief glimpse into how the world is presented to someone who is not myself. You buy some shea butter without blocking trackers and now completely different musicians appear to be the most popular, or the tones of makeup being advertised to you default to deeper tones. It always reverts back when the algorithm figures out that I'm white again. It's a noticeable change that always and only happens when I do something relating to curly hair care and/or managing eczema.
Having spent a year now with my algorithm now considering me to be a basic nail polish girlie and not a queer revolutionary, it sometimes seems like I've been living in another world from my queer friends whose algorithms still primarily present content that I'd been getting shown previously. Completely different news events and memes are what we've already heard of. Where have you been? Living under a rock? No, just in a different algorithm tunnel where pop culture is different somehow.
If your algorithm does mostly show you people talking about the need for militaristic revolution, and news articles supporting that worldview, it is also because the algorithm believes you "enjoy" that content and has figured out that showing you that content will get you to spend more time on the app. It is not a human and does not understand the qualitative difference between Marxism-Leninism and Makeup Tutorials.
Even without algorithms, we also can self-filter what we see through who we choose to follow and unfollow. We do not see the same world.
Even without computers, we live in different geographies and strata of society. We work in different professions and institutions. The stratification and segregation of society means we will see different problems and "common" ideas. Not even because of a willing looking away, but through mere lack of exposure. Many people do not encounter that which you encounter in daily life, offline.
We do not even see the same stars around the world.
I highly recommend talking regularly to at least one person in your life who is in an entirely different bubble. I find it's the only thing that can really drive home to me how non-universal my experiences are
Seriously, do it. Sure, this may be an easier proposition in some places than others (American suburbs in particular are all but designed to prevent this) but you should still try it sometime. Even if your neighbors end up being complete cunts! Even if it's some weirdo Trumper, if you won't get any sort of good company out of it (and let's face it, if you're posting here you almost certainly won't) it'll still give you some insight into what's going on in their head. In their life. Why they're like this. You don't have to agree with anything they think - but it's useful to know the how and why.
Best case scenario though? You make new friends out of it, you expand other people's horizons, and they in turn expand your own. For most of my life now I've kind of made it a point to keep people from different walks of life in my life - I know people in income brackets from 'makes my disability income dependent ass look bougie' to 'may be an actual millionaire', of nearly every ethnic group under the sun, from multiple countries. All of them being online and interacting through a very US-dominated internet is its own bubble, sure - but ironically living in the hood is a boon there in its own right, since I still get to meet a wide variety of people living here, have to at least acknowledge someone else's existence anytime I go out, and they in turn have to acknowledge mine - my tall, fat, vaguely mixed trans goth ass. Not too many folks like me running around either, suffice to say.
I suppose the point I'm making here is this: as easy as it gets to get extremely wrapped up in online shit, the moment you like, establish some rapport with the people around you? The moment you get some view into people's lives who aren't online all the time? It pretty quickly becomes clear that like... practically none of this discourse shit matters in the real world. Sure, there's the rare bizarro conservative you might spot in the wild, but by far most people simply could not give a shit about half the stuff that gets everyone's hackles raised online and would stare at you like you grew two heads if you asked them if they were proship or antiship or whatever.
By all means, fight the good fight. But know that you're never going to effectively fight the good fight if your views don't align with people's basic daily realities.
