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.
