My life in the algorithm

A cautionary tale for us all

Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash

I don’t need another mascara. The one I’ve got works as well as any mascara will on my short, stubby lashes, which is to say: not very well. If I had ever used the lotion or serum or whatever it was I bought that you’re meant to coat on your eyelashes to make them sprout like spring flowers in an Alpine meadow, then perhaps it would be a different story. But I didn’t.

It’s the same with the gadget I bought that’s meant to “lift” your face and “tighten” your jowls. Who wouldn’t want to look much younger for just a few minutes of pressing a gadget to your face? A couple of minutes each side, according to the little video I watched on my phone. About the same as brushing your teeth.

Who wouldn’t?

Well, me.

There are tech bros practically starving themselves in order to live for ever. Some are even forking out the price of a *very* nice house in Puglia to be frozen when they die in the hope of springing back to full health, and life. I admire their dedication. I think they’re nuts, but you have to admire their dedication.

As for me, my interest in looking young, radiant and hirsute in the eyelash department seems to last as long as it takes to click the link that will get me their best-ever (time-limited) offer. Once the thing has arrived in the post, my attention flits to something else. Trump! Farage! Armageddon! I think there must be a part of me that thinks that with that click, my work is done.

I am talking, of course, about Instagram and the constant stream of ads your feed feeds you. “Feeds” is, perhaps, not quite the word. It feeds and starves you at the same time. It feeds your interest, picked up by some magic we have to suppose is an algorithm, in the way wood feeds a fire. The wood disappears in a puff of smoke. Literally, in a puff of smoke. The fire needs more, and more, and more.

I think I’m meant to think that my life should look like this. Photo by Jay Soundo on Unsplash

Five years ago, while scrolling through Instagram, I saw an ad for an “Instagram makeover” course. I clicked on the “free” video. After watching the free video, I clicked on the special offer/buy now course. It was, I think, about £300. It was “self-paced”. Which was the problem. Maybe if I’d done it, I’d be an Instagram influencer now. I’d be preaching to millions about: well, I don’t know, maybe: how to have a lovely life? I couldn’t tell you what the exact ingredients are, but I can tell you that being alive and well and with friends in your life is a pretty good start. But I didn’t do the course because it was, as I’ve said, “self-paced”. And I need whips. I need someone standing over me with a cat o’ nine tails. Give me a deadline. A proper deadline. Give me a meeting with a client. If I’ve said I’ll do something, I’ll do it, but I have to have said it to someone who will care if I do it or don’t. Otherwise, it goes straight in the “I won’t have a drink till Friday” category.

Yeah, right.

I’m not going to tell you how many courses I’ve signed up for. Not least because I’ve lost count. My current Insta-feed is full of ads for AI-based language apps. Some promise me that I can be fluent in Italian in three weeks. I even signed up for one the other day, but managed to extract myself after an exhausting stream of emails when I realized I’d have to pay even more for the AI feature that had seduced me in the first place.

I’ve been learning Italian, off and on, since I was fourteen. I know what it takes to become good at a language. It takes huge amounts of dedication, study, memorising, writing, practising. Oh, and total immersion. Staying, for example, with a family that doesn’t speak a word of English and forcing yourself to use whatever words you’ve got because it’s just so awkward and embarrassing if you don’t. That’s what I did when I was young and it worked fairly well. So what makes me think it’s different now?

As far as I know, there aren’t yet any apps that say “click here and become an architect/airline pilot/brain surgeon in five easy self-paced lessons”. If there were, I’d probably sign up for all three.

I do, I do. Photo by Samantha Borges on Unsplash

Five years ago, I started training as a coach. It has felt like quite an arduous process. There has been homework. There has been assessment. There have been exams. I’ve had recordings of sessions assessed by people who have themselves had to leap through millions of hoops. I had to rack up more than 500 hours of coaching to get my most recent qualification and then do a ghastly exam. It has left me confident that I’m a good coach. I’ve had lovely testimonials from people who seem to think so. They take me on because they need help to make changes in their lives and work and they know that making change isn’t easy.

So why do I think I can sprout magic eyelashes/gain a tight jawline/become fluent in Italian/develop a social media presence that gets me exactly the work I want, by just clicking on a link?

The weird thing is that I’ve never been all that susceptible to advertising. I was much more interested in the “serious” sections of newspapers than the colour supplements. If anything, I was rather cerebral: a voracious reader of news, comment, essays, fiction, non-fiction and poetry. I was not, in other words, a passive consumer of tiny, twitching videos promising me the sun, the moon and the stars.

I suppose what has happened to me is what has happened to Western civilization. I, we, have gone a bit mad.

When Facebook came along, I hated the idea of it. The Facebook profile I eventually created was a “professional” one, with a professional photo. I used it only to post the odd piece I’d written. I didn’t want to share my holiday photos or look at anyone else’s.

Twitter, too, started as duty. A few years after it was created, while I was at The Independent, someone in management announced that there would be weekly league tables. We would, it turned out, all appear in these tables and our place would depend on the number of our Twitter followers. It was, literally, the only aspect of our performance that was measured.

I hated the idea of being assessed in this way but I secretly liked Twitter. It was witty. It was pithy. There were lots of bright people making acerbic comments about politics, books and breaking news. It was fascinating. It was fun. It was, as it was intended to be, a kind of global town square. And then Elon Musk turned it into a sewer.

As for LinkedIn. Well, shoot me now. Congrats to the team etc. As far as I can tell, it’s full of AI-generated humble-brags “liked” by people who pretend to be thrilled that the people who have cobbled together this polysyllabic Polyfilla seem to be doing an awful lot better than them.

Which isn’t to say I don’t have a LinkedIn profile. I do.

The trouble is, it’s kind of compulsory, isn’t it? If you have a stable job you’re never going to lose, and which doesn’t involve any cheerleading for your company, then perhaps you can opt out of it all. But it’s a bit like that family in Italy who were recently in the news. You can live “off grid” if you want to, but you will pay a price. You might not have your children taken away, but if, for example, you’re a writer who wants to be published, and you choose not to be on social media, you’re adding black ice to a winding mountain path. Publishers will check how many followers or subscribers you have on Substack or Instagram. Companies will check your LinkedIn to see if you’re a “thought leader” (whatever that might be). If you opt out, you lock yourself out. Would madam like the devil or the deep blue sea?

I hardly ever post on Facebook. I’ve pretty much left the ashes of X/Twitter. I rarely post on LinkedIn or Instagram. I have a shadow Instagram life which involves taking photos of masses of things I think look lovely and then thinking: why on earth would anyone be interested in any of this? My feed, which used to show me posts by people I know, now offers me a stream of ads and gurus: plus-size influencers telling me that I’m “enough”, silver-haired women looking chic in lots of different outfits and younger women selling me mascaras/neck creams/lip-plumpers/writing courses/courses that will enable me to create and sell courses etc etc etc.

My Instagram thinks I only listen to women. My Instagram thinks I’m only interested in fashion and make up and property in Puglia and a glamorous life as a writer that involves performative bouts of writing and fluent Italian. My Instagram is blissfully untouched by my worries about the future of liberal democracy or Putin’s desire to conquer Europe.

Gratuitous photo of Puglia, because I’m addicted to them. Photo by Alessio Roversi on Unsplash

It’s as if Instagram has created a cocktail of all the surface things that have fleetingly captured my attention and swept under a (gorgeous antique Persian) carpet the stuff that keeps me awake at night. It is, in fact, as if Instagram has drugged me. It’s a place I dip into where magic happens. Not the creative alchemy of art or fiction, but actual magical thinking, where you can change your appearance/life/expertise or lack of it with a single click.

This, my friends, is how populism breeds. This is how brain cells die. We’re drugged into apathy, drugged into inertia, lulled into a fantasy that if we can keep everything looking lovely, it will all be fine.

It’s unnerving shifting between that world, Barbie-world, if you like, and the world where the rules of gravity, history and bond markets apply. I dip into Barbie-world as a “treat”, but it makes me feel frazzled and queasy. It’s like eating a bucket of M & Ms when you really want a meal.

In my real life, I know that what I need is proper food. My brain misfires when it’s fed this pap but it has, thank God, had decades of proper food. What happens when we live in a world where people skip the proper food and are just drip-fed the pap?

For the fights that are coming, we are going to need our brains and our attention. The guys who shredded it, and who won’t let their children use the devices that shredded it, can flee to their bunkers in New Zealand or on Mars, but we can’t.

I don’t know what happens to our civilization when we skip the proper food, but I can tell you the best mascara I’ve discovered, It’s L’Oréal’s Telescopic. It aims, like a telescope, to magnify distant objects. What it doesn’t do is block them out.

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I’d love to hear about your use of social media. What do you like/dislike and how would you say it has affected your life?

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