Out With Mirrors, Looking For Ourselves

Notes On: Finding curiosity in a world defined by the algorithm

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.” – Susan Sontag

“It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent—lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.”– Tove Jansson

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The first thing I did with access to The Internet was have a conversation with God. I wasn’t – and I’m still not – religious, but my friends had discovered a kind of chat bot with ‘God.’ You could ask it lots of questions: are you real, you might type, and the response would be something philosophical and ‘deep’ like: yes, I am real, but that does not mean that you can see me. I used to stay up late asking it questions.

As a teenager, Google was like a portal to another world. I spent hours on Google Earth, zooming in on places I’d never been before, traversing the pixelated streets of Milwaukee, Michigan or Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Through Wikipedia, I learned all about the second world war; about the oxford comma; about Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and how they painted the interior of a church, once. I spent whole afternoons finding out about how violins were made; reading names of people who boarded the Titanic (for a history project) as well as how to make paper look time-worn using tea bags (for the same project). I wasn’t allowed to go on any of the social media sites; Bebo, or MySpace. I couldn’t ‘e-chat’ with my friends. My time on The Internet was limited – by my parents – but it was also limitless. A playground for my imagination: A feast for my curiosity. It made me so excited, I remember, to inhabit this world. There was just so much to discover. (I was also eleven years old – I was learning that this world is vast and full of wondrous things – the timing was, shall we say, fortuitous).

Fast forward to 2024, and the internet feels like a trap. Social media feeds us with everything it thinks we might want. At the behest of algorithms who guess our every fleeting want, I scroll, my mind empty and full at the same time (here’s a bean salad recipe to feel full and replenished! Here’s why you’re sleeping too much! Too little! Here’s why you should be taping your face! Here’s why you shouldn’t! Also: Men own your body ha ha what the fuck). It is a world constructed on the premise that each of us is individual, unique and therefore requires our very own personalised echo chamber: everything is for you. We read the books recommended to us by our TikTok feeds and listen to the music on our Spotify feeds and laugh at the memes on our Instagram feeds and decry the politics on our X (Twitter) feeds.

And everything starts to feel the same. (Which is ironic, because isn’t eternal personalisation meant to make everything… Different?).

Finding “Taste” In The Vacuum

According to

Brendon Holder

, who wrote the brilliant essay ‘When Your Phone Is A Mirror, Everything Is A Selfie’, ‘things have become extricable from each other’:

Not only is everything a reference to something else but something can be a thing only because its relation to a previous thing. Such is true of the algorithm, such is true for the nepo baby. Industries run on this. Hollywood would rather invest in a film reboot or sequel than take a risk on true innovation and then act shocked when it performs poorly. To sell a novel, one must prepare a list of “comps”, that is, books that are similar enough in theme and audience so those in publishing can predict its sales rather than assess the work on its individual merit. Maybe this is why everyone’s writing sounds the same.

Brendon coined a phrase for it: ‘the vacuum of duplication’. Much like Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror – he says – and Naomi Klein’s Mirror World, ‘the vacuum of duplication’ references the circular nature of the algorithm. The echo chambers that direct our attentions inwards.

A couple of weeks ago, The New Yorker published an article decrying the ‘Banality of Online Recommendation Culture.’ In the piece, Kyle Chayka investigates “the recent surge of human-curated guidance” as “both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations.” He continues:

Platforms want to tell us what to buy, where to eat, and, generally, how to live better consumerist lives

In a world of sameness – in which everyone is drinking from a Stanley cup and listening to Sabrina Carpenter and reading Intermezzo and watching (then subsequently having half-baked opinions about) Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives – “making the right recommendation comes with clout.” (Tyler Bainbridge, founder of Perfectly Imperfect).

The piece also references “E-mail newsletters” which – according to Chayka – “encourage a kind of benign narcissism: in the quest to fill readers’ inboxes, authors resort to sharing the latest books they’ve read, albums they’ve listened to, and podcasts whose opinions they’ve adopted.” Yikes. 

In an attempt to feed the ever-hungry algorithm, writers of newsletters become something else: tastemakers, perhaps, or content creators. Because, let’s be honest, who has something new to say – a new piece of invaluable wisdom, or cultural criticism – every few days? But if you have to feed the algorithm (and there’s lots of discussion about whether this is a terrible thing for Substack, in particular), then you don’t really have a choice. You resort to fun, slightly less time-consuming round-ups, in the style of Nora Ephron’s lists. These Are My Top Five Podcasts This Week, your write, or: Here Are The Best Books To Read When You’re Feeling Low (because if there’s one thing writers do, it’s read). Emily Sundberg famously decried these listicles, but I think they’re I fun, and fresh, and unique, and tasteful, and inspiring.

If there’s a problem with them (which, to be clear, I don’t think there is), it’s that the people who are making this kind of ‘content’ are writers. They’re thinkers; they’re journalists, or artists. They might take weeks metabolising idea, nurturing it from a kernel into something golden: writing and re-writing it, before it’s ready to see the world.

“Make Art, Not [Content]” (what’s the difference, again??)

Kate Eichorn, a media historian and a professor at the New School and author of Content – published by M.I.T Press – is interested in the distinction between art and content:

Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend considerable time producing (or paying someone else to produce) content about themselves and their work.

The main difference between Art and Content – as far as I can see – is the ways in which it engages with the notion of curiosity. Often, content is created specifically for social media: it plays by the rules of Instagram, for example, by subliminally encouraging its audience to stay within the app. It is created for engagement. To be consumed, like a vitamin, swallowed down amidst the rough and tumble of news updates and engagement announcements. It is, in other words, a means to a (viral) end. Art, on the other hand, is expansive. It opens the mind; it inspires curiosity. If Content answers questions, Art asks them.  

In 2024, artists are encouraged to create content – to go viral – in order to promote their art. And it becomes this circular re-enforcing loop, where content and art are smushed together, becoming almost indistinguishable:

Pop stars log their daily routines on TikTok. Journalists spout banal opinions on Twitter. The best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur posts reels and photos of her typewritten poems. All are trapped by the daily pressure to produce ancillary content—memes, selfies, shitposts—to fill an endless void (Kyle Chakra, The New Yorker).

On The Consumer Problem (“Is This Fucking Play About Us?”)

Much has been written about the need for writers to become ‘content creators’ – to create personal brands which appeal to mass audiences – but what if we look at it from the opposite perspective? If viral content is feeding what is made in the artistic world, what does that mean for those consuming it? In a world in which we’re constantly fed what to eat, drink, watch, read think – by algorithms who purport to ‘know’ us – what does this mean for our curiosity?

As Brendon Holder wrote, “Maybe artists repeat themselves not because they can no longer innovate. Perhaps it’s because we, the consumer, can no longer metabolise innovation.”

I think, partly why these algorithms work so well is that they make us feel seen. And in a burning world, that feels really quite special. As anthropologist and associate professor New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication Natasha Dow Schüll told The Cut: “at the end of the day, people like being recognised.” 

But if all we’re ever getting is our own kind of mirror-image (‘when your phone is a mirror, everything is a selfie’), then our curiosity becomes limited, too, to ourselves.

We become curious only in how to make ourselves better; how to be more beautiful, or more productive, or even live a slower life. And the rest of the world – that wide, expansive internet that could take you into all sorts of different realms – well, none of it matters, does it? We’re no longer an audience; instead, we’re consumers. We don’t savour; we gulp, swallow, and move onto the next.

And at the same time, the consumer is also the creator; every individual has a megaphone. Virality – and fame – is within grasping reach: “The more you use the Internet, the more your individuality warps into a brand, and your subjectivity transforms into an algorithmically plottable vector of activity” (Justin E. H. Smith, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is).

In other words: it becomes harder and harder to see – or be curious about – anything online that isn’t, in some way, about you. 

The Wonder Of The Rabbit Hole

According to Kyle Chayka, “the question is not how to escape it but how to understand ourselves in its inescapable wake.” I like this approach. Because I don’t think the answer is necessarily deleting all the apps – partly because it’s interesting, isn’t it, to track how social media interacts with (and arguably moulds) culture in the real world. But I like this approach because it seems almost therapeutic: to be aware of the reinforced mirroring is to be informed of it. To think about how your own curiosity might be being stifled by these external forces gives us agency; gives us power.

And part of me does wonder, (she says, in her best Carrie Bradshaw voice), whether all of this might just be because the internet isn’t new anymore. Because I’m not eleven years old, anymore. I don’t get that buzz of turning on the computer after a day of school, ready for a conversation with God.

That feeling that I, alone, am doing something new and exciting and completely my own. I had no idea that that’s what all my peers were doing, too: chatting to strangers on Club Penguin and writing secret blogs and diving into obsessional Google holes about Justin Bieber or how bees reproduce or whether the cast of Friends were actually friends in real life or how to make cheese. But here’s something that’s easy to forget: the Internet is still expansive, and cool, and exciting.

Whilst researching for this piece, I actually did drop myself down into the streets of Phnom Penh, and Milwaukee (and also my childhood home, which made me cry, but that’s a story for another time). You can watch live animal sanctuaries and listen to ‘pool type’ music on Poolsuite, or nature sounds on Earth.fm; and you can literally turn research into a leisure activity!!! Wikipedia rabbit holes are fun. Micro obsessions are fun. Curiosity is fun!!! (And no, of course it isn’t dead, lol).

We may exist in a hall of mirrors; but we can choose to step outside. To gulp down the fresh air and open a second-hand book from the back of some dusty store and find a hand-written note written from a woman to her lover in 1861 and remind us that this world is bigger and wider and more fascinating than the many, many, many duplicitous algorithmic hall-of-mirror-like reflections of ourselves. And isn’t that quite a freeing thought?

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P. S.

This whole essay is kinda hyperbolic, and kinda ironic. Because I literally am a content creator. I have a TikTok account which regularly curates playlists and mood boards and book recommendations and TV recommendations and podcast recommendations. I wouldn’t call myself a ‘tastemaker’ because I think my ‘taste’ is too mainstream for that (I’d call myself: basic-white-girl-with-an-obsession-with-pop-culture-and-also-reading-who-sometimes-gives-recommendations).