The Human Algorithm

What if the world is ruled by – people?! Not a secret big tech algorithm...

Photo by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash

We live on social media. Even those who don’t.

What do I mean?

Have you noticed, that the news often speaks about some politician “writing on X” that something has happened or will be done?

They have stopped referring to other news media as the source of anything – it all comes from social media, and mostly from X. It means, that even those people who are trying to live off the grid, away from the Internet, and not being controlled by big tech – well, they are being overtaken on the inside by the rest of the society.

Actions are then taken by the society, based on what was said on X. Almost nothing happens, no reactions, if it wasn’t first said on X that someone said something.

There is no escape from social media.

And who rules the social media? Elon Musk? Donald Trump? God?

It is difficult to talk about what happens, without mentioning at least one of the above, or instead – The Algorithm.

It is such a mysterious mechanism that decides and does everything. The Algorithm is everywhere. Some people try to follow its commands to the detail, even though these are never expressed, while others try to cheat it and do things that the algorithm doesn’t control and doesn’t know about.

But cheating the algorithm is difficult, because – it truly is everywhere.

I guess, some of us would like to believe that the algorithm has been programmed by some people, who have bosses, telling them what to do. We don’t like the idea of some kind of self-evolving, self-programming mechanism that is completely out of anybody’s control.

But what if that is the case?

If we have no knowledge about its function, nobody will tell how it works, and nobody has ever been pointed out as its creator – then it may be because it doesn’t exist!

“But wait a minute!” you’ll probably burst out now, “something is regulating what we see, and who will see what we ourselves write – that doesn’t regulate itself!”

Let’s try a thought example:

You are walking in the forest. It’s autumn, and leaves are falling off the trees, landing just about everywhere. They have all shades of yellow, brown, red, and possibly more colors – looking absolutely astonishing. The ground between the trees is covered with a thick layer of this beauty, and so is the path you’re walking on.

A squirrel is busy jumping around in the leaves, maybe looking for a nut it once hid there, in the ground, and a woodpecker is busy trying to dig out the last larvae from the surrounding trees.

The trees themselves are plenty. This forest is a natural one, not planted to become wood – it just is, as forests can be, and someone made a path there.

You look around, taking in also the soft sounds of the falling leaves, the low whispering of the wind in the tree tops, and the picking of the woodpecker, along with the rattling of leaves where the squirrel is busy just now.

A sound from far away makes you think of a branch cracking off, but you don’t see anything. A bump, almost impossible to hear through the other sounds. Obviously, the branch fell to the ground? Or was it even a complete tree falling? As you didn’t see anything, just heard something slightly, you can only guess.

If you are very lucky, and do walk around a lot in the forest, you may sooner or later see what it was you heard. Or what it could have been. When you see something that it could have been, you will make the connection in your mind. Then, your truth becomes this – there was a branch, you can see it now, for whatever reason cracking off the tree it had been part of for years. The branch that lies below the tree is dry, and obviously it would crack off some day in any case, but what made it do it just now, isn’t clear.

You conclude that the slight wind, the squirrels jumping around, or perhaps a bird, such as a woodpecker, had moved the branch a bit more than it was still able to resist, and therefore it cracked off.

Now you know the truth, you think. You know it all.

But what if that wasn’t the truth?

Actually, several other branches could have broken off from just as many trees, and you heard just one, but was this the one? Also, they could have broken off for many reasons, which may not have had anything to do with wind, squirrels, or birds. And, indeed, what you heard might have been something else altogether.

As you know the truth, or so you believe, you’ll stop paying attention to things it could have been. “Case resolved”, you’ll think, and you’ll move on to all the other things you want to do and think about in life.

Same thing with the algorithm.

Your movements on social media, and on the internet in general, is like that walk in the forest. You see some things, and you feel that you know those well. From those, you build a model of the world – this is where you are navigating, and you know the paths, you enjoy some of what you see and hear, and you know just what it all is, because you have seen and heard it before. Like the squirrel, the woodpecker, and the wind.

But then there are all those other things happening. You see the results of some of them, and you hear a sound from time to time, but you don’t know what it all is, or why it is there.

In that last category, you’ll find the selection and order of posts you see in your stream. Maybe you would see all posts if you kept scrolling, but it isn’t likely. Some are in your feed, others not, that’s what you conclude from having spent lots of hours looking at that feed.

Have you ever tried scrolling to the end? Well, that’s not easy in a feed with endless scroll, as you will find on most social media, but if you try, you might get surprised!

Doomscrolling only takes you so far. You’ll stop after some time, because there is no more time to spend, or you lose interest in it. But if you keep scrolling just a bit more, and again, and again, without stopping – you might actually see the end of the endless scroll!

I have tried it, several times. It ends. Not in the same way as a movie, that shows a nice sign saying “The End” or similar, but it ends by breaking down. Suddenly, when you keep scrolling and scrolling, it doesn’t do it. You try, but you’ll just get an hourglass or a spinning circle, or whatever your device does when it wants to look like if it is thinking.

It isn’t endless. It breaks off at some point. Like when the sailors in ancient times were afraid of sailing over the edge of the world and falling down into the void – and if that edge was the reality, not a myth. That is actually what happens on social media. Except for one important detail. You can most often just start from the top again. Not the same top, as some other posts will be shown this time, but the concept of the top. A top.

Okay, that thing about the end is somewhat of a sidestep. What I wanted to tell is what the nature of the stream could be like, as you don’t know where all those things you see actually came from.

Like that sound in the forest, all you know is that it’s there, but you don’t know why. It’s like in even more ancient times, when religion was invented by people because they were given up trying to understand how everything was connected, finally deciding that there had to be one or more gods who had arranged it all.

The algorithm is such a modern god. It is used to explain what you see, because you have no other explanation.

But what if…

What if all those leaves, squirrels and all the rest of impressions in the forest had each their own path in the universe, with no reason behind it, and without being controlled by anyone? If such a sound you hear is just one of many, but you happen to hear only this one. And it could be anything, really, as you didn’t see what happened, so it may not be part of your universe with anything but the sound?

What if the posts on the social media just enter your stream arbitrarily, right when people are posting them? You have thousands of connections and people you follow, and there are also some commercials, and some paid distribution, where people paid the platform for a bigger reach. What if all of this is just being poured into your stream with no rules or regulations, really, other than what gets there first will be what you see first?

And for all other users, a similar arbitrary pouring of posts takes place, leading to lots of arbitrary streams.

You can discuss with them what you see, and they can tell you what they see. It will be different. You can all look for patterns, trying to match anything you see there with your mental model of the world of that social media. You will see different patterns. And you can make some connections that look reasonable to you – so they’ll become your truth. But some of your discussion partners may make different connections and see a different truth. How to explain that?

Either you end up deciding that it’s all just a mystery with some unknown power behind it, the almighty Algorithm, or you decide that the world is all chaos, without any system or control.

With the chaos theory, the presumed presence of an algorithm is simply what it looks like when many people do things simultaneously on the same platform. It is difficult to see a pattern, and if any occurs, it might be a false one, or it might be the result of chain reactions, like when one falling leave hits another on its way down, and that one then also falls. The pattern could then be a matter of presumed similarity, like in fractals, where you see sort of the same everywhere, but then not quite.

Humans look for patterns. That’s what we call intelligence. Sometimes, our intelligence is deceptive and leads to a map of the world that is all made up.