Resisting The Algorithm

It’s also a non-cooperation movement 

Every night, I lie to the internet. I read about one thing, then deliberately look up another with nothing to do with it. I watch something and refuse to follow the recommendations trail that appears after. I search, browse and move on, leaving a history that must be terribly frustrating for any algorithm trying to make sense of who I am.

I do this because I don’t want the internet to know me too well. That may sound odd. We’ve spent years being told tech becomes useful once it understands us. Tell Google what you like and it finds more of it. Let YouTube learn what you watch and it recommends something you’ll probably enjoy. Give Instagram enough attention and it gets very good at knowing what might hold yours.

Convenient, certainly. But it comes with a quiet price. The algorithm doesn’t need to tell you what to think. It does something subtler. It decides what you see often enough that you stop noticing what you don’t. It takes a passing interest and turns it into a category, a preference, a world. If you like something, here’s more of it. 

If you agree with something, here are people who agree with you. If something angers you, here’s another thing that will. Soon the internet becomes an efficient version of your own prejudices, dressed up as your own discoveries. That’s a kind of colonisation – not of land, but of mind. Not by force, but by familiarity, repeated until it feels like your own idea. By feeding us more of what we already believe, algorithms can turn difference into division.

Gandhi’s non-cooperation took on an empire with soldiers and salt taxes. Mine barely inconveniences a server somewhere. I make no claim to that comparison, only to the shape underneath it – that refusal, however modest, is a way of keeping something for yourself. 

He withdrew cooperation from a system built on obedience. I withdraw mine, in my own small way, from one built on predictability. Google, YouTube, Meta, X, none of them have worked out what I’m interested in. I have, through careful effort, made myself a poor subject for prediction. It’s hardly a freedom struggle. But this Independence Day, I found myself thinking freedom has always meant one simple thing: deciding for yourself what kind of world you want to live in. Mine just happens to begin with confusing Big Tech.

END OF ARTICLE