The responsibility of believing (2)

Content-selecting algorithms (particularly on YouTube, as Zeynep Tufekci has noted) tend to serve users increasingly extreme content as they try to winnow in on what makes viewing compulsive. This approach, however, is ultimately indifferent to the nature of the content itself. It capitalizes instead on the tension between personalization and social participation, harmonizing the seemingly divergent poles in the experience of consuming one video after another. The algorithms become a proxy for an implied community, an in-group that rewards your curiosity by showing you more and more. They substantiate the idea that you can furrow into yourself by surrendering to personalized content yet still open an entire universe that’s filled with people like you, on the same journey. As the furor over fake news, filter bubbles, and alternative sets of facts suggest, these new possibilities for experiencing pockets of inclusive exclusivity can support actual communities, organized around preferred interpretations. Their “truth” lies in how they make us feel, not in their accuracy. Algorithms alone don’t radicalize users; it’s rather the imagined community behind them, the structured sociality that seems to promise to organize our insular desires, to make our consumption meaningful and socially relevant somehow even as it testifies to our power to get information about anything we want, anything at all.

Online discourse, which grants users a seemingly supernatural sense of their own information independence, favors content made in its image. Often what we like about the internet is not the access it seems to provide to a “real world” that exceeds it, but rather its paranormal qualities, reflected in paranormal content that captures how readily the restrictions of place-bound normality can be transcended. Slender Man, a crowd-sourced ghost that emerged from a Something Awful forum in 2009, exemplifies how the uncanny collaborative power of networks can become refracted as a recursive spiral of seemingly supernatural energy. In an essay for the VQR, Alex Mar writes that “the monster was deliberately vague, his story almost completely open-ended — and so the internet rushed in to make of him what it wanted.” Crowd-sourcing became a kind of self-referential procedure of haunting, taking every proof of its efficacy as an intensification of the otherworldliness inherent in it, capable of obscuring any story’s origins and producing a fog of possibility, a sense of unguided but ever increasing agency. 

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Information that costs something to believe builds a bond; social media impose that cost, providing a forum of accountability. As the flat-earthers told Burdick, it is hard for them to admit their beliefs to a general public, but that is all the more reason to seize upon technology that multiplies many different publics operating in overlapping simultaneity. This sets our expectations of what we might hope to find when we open our apps: curses, rabbit holes, feuds, loyalty tests, life itself as we want to see it, as inexplicable and unavoidable as the sky.

Rob Horning, True Nonbelievers na Real Life desta semana.