One of the streaming music app I use create custom playlists for me and it’s great at predicting songs I’ll like. Does that make me boring?
-Play safe
Dear play it safe,
I read somewhere that if you want to slowly drive someone crazy, stick to it, for a week or so, muttering occasionally, “I knew you would say so” after they gave a normal number of comments. The logic, as far as I can tell, is that by convincing a person that their thoughts are completely predictable, you gradually erode their sense of self-control until they can no longer consider themselves is an autonomous organism. I don’t know if this really works – I’ve never been brutal enough to try it. But if its premise is true, we must all be slowly losing our minds. How many times a day are we reminded that our actions can be accurately predicted? Predictive text successfully guess how we will reply an email. Amazon suggested the very book we wanted to read. These days it’s rare to finish typing a Google query before autocomplete ended our thoughts, a reminder that our medical anxieties, creative projects, and relationship dilemmas are all over the place. unfounded.
For those of us raised in the loopholes of capitalism’s ultimate individualism, we believe our souls are as unique as the prints of our thumbs and inexplicable. Like a snowflake, the idea that our interests fall into recognizable patterns is profound, perhaps even existential, unsettling. In fact, Play Safe, I’m willing to bet your real worry isn’t that you’re boring but that you’re not really free. If your preferences can be easily inferred from your listening history and the data streams of “users like you” (to borrow the patronage of predictors), do you really the selection? Could it be that your indescribable and seemingly spontaneous joy listening to your favorite Radiohead song in college was merely the inflexible mathematical endpoint of the probability vector that defined your personality? since birth?
While this anxiety may feel new, it stems from a much older problem of predictability and individual freedom, one that first emerged in response to a belief in foreknowledge. God. If God could see the future with perfect accuracy, wouldn’t human actions necessarily be predetermined? How can we act differently? A scientific version of the problem was posed by 19th-century French physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace, who imagined a cosmic superintelligence that knew every detail about the universe, down to the main location. the bodies of all its atoms. If this entity (now known as the Laplace demon) understood everything about the current world and possessed an intelligence “big enough to send data for analysis,” it could perfectly predict the future, saving the world. revealed that all events, including our actions, belong to a long domino chain of cause and effect that extends back to the birth of the universe.
Algorithm predicting your musical taste is less complicated than the cosmic intelligence that Laplace had in mind. But it still reveals, to a lesser extent, the extent to which your actions are constrained by your past choices and certain general probabilities about human behavior. And it’s not hard to extrapolate what predictive technologies might reveal about our sense of self-governance once they become even better at predicting our actions and emotional states — may even surpass our own understanding. Would we accept their suggestions to get married or vote for, just as we now make their recommendations on what to watch and what to read? Will the police department arrest potential criminals before they commit crimes, as they did in Minority Report, debunked by extraordinary predictions about digital currency? A few years ago, Amazon filed a patent on “expected shipping,” a banking service in the hope that the company would soon be able to do exactly that. guess our order (and start preparing them for shipping) before we make a purchase.
If the revelation of your own dullness were only the first vibrations of this new reality, how should you respond? One option would be to rebel and try to prove your assumptions wrong. Outstanding action. When you are inclined to do something, do the opposite. Listen to music you hate. Making choices will reroute your data flow. This is the solution given by Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from the ground, who commits irrational acts and self-harms just to prove that he is not enslaved to the inflexible calculations of rational self-interest. The novel was written during the golden age of rational egoism, when some disbelieving thinkers believed that human behavior could be reduced to a series of logical rules to maximize happiness. happiness and create an ideal society. The narrator asserts that most people would find a world intolerable because it would destroy their belief in individual freedom. We value our autonomy over all the comforts and advantages that scientific determinism offers – we will, he argues, seek absurdity or even self-harm to prove that we are free. If science ever unequivocally proves that humans act according to these fateful laws, we will destroy ourselves “for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and a live according to our foolish will again!”
It’s an interesting passage, though as predictors, it’s not particularly predictive. Few of us today appear to be tormented by the comforts of predictive analytics. In fact, the amenities they provide are said to be so desirable that we often collude with them. Above Spotify, we “like” the songs we love, adding another piece to our emerging mosaic of digital bravery. Above TikTok, we quickly scroll through previous posts that don’t reflect our dominant interests, to avoid having the algorithm seeing everything confuse our curiosity with invested interest. Perhaps you paused, once or twice, before watching Netflix movies are different from your usual taste, or hesitate before searching a question about religion on Google, lest you become a true believer and skew your future search results. If you want to optimize your recommendations, the best thing to do is to act as much as “yourself” as possible, to maintain a firm and permanent character — that is, to act in a way that is completely contrary to what you think. contrary to the complex reality of human nature.
With that said, I don’t recommend embracing the absurd or acting against your self-interest. It won’t make you happy, nor prove a point. Randomness is a poor substitute for true freedom. Perhaps you should reconsider the undetermined premise of the query instead, which is that your identity is determined by consumer choice. Your fear of becoming boring may have less to do with your supposed vanilla flavor than the fact that these platforms have enabled us to see our souls through the lens of celebrity names. Recipe entries are designed to be easy for advertisers to read. It’s all too easy to mistake our characters for the bullet points that grace our bios: our relationship status, our professional relationships, posts and memes, and themes. Topics we like, purchases we’ve made, and playlists we’ve built.
