How I Became The Voice of the Algorithm

I did not become the voice of the Algorithm overnight.

It started in late 2022 when I left Twitter, after the Musk takeover. I left behind a community of 12,000 – artists, scientists, and other interesting people – that I had built over 12 years, and set off into the social media unknown. Although I already had an Instagram account, it felt like starting over from zero. I joined Mastodon, Bluesky, Post (RIP), and Threads, and I got used to lobbing words and pictures into the digital void, getting almost no response to anything I posted – a disheartening exercise.

I talked to my artist friends about how to be seen in the rapidly changing internet landscape. Everyone had ideas – post more often, post process videos, use more hashtags, use fewer hashtags, tag people, don’t tag people. The algorithm loves reels of people talking. The algorithm eats up time-lapse videos. The algorithm hates external links.  Everybody had a theory, but nobody really knew what worked.

I decided to seek expert help, consulting two business coaches in early 2023. One encouraged me to go hard on SEO, creating big blocks of text about my art, studded with carefully researched keywords. The other told me that SEO would be a complete waste of time for an individual artist.

As all this contradictory advice was whirling around my head, I was reading a novel (Ariadne by Jennifer Saint) based on an ancient Greek myth. The characters in the book were forever making sacrifices or performing rituals so the gods would smile on their endeavors. Often the rituals didn’t work, but the humans somehow never blamed the gods, only themselves.

One day, I had a sudden realization that we, modern creators, were doing the exact same thing as the ancients.

We were sharing folk wisdom, often faulty, about how to placate the gods. But now, our god was the almighty Algorithm.

So I asked myself, if I were the Algorithm, if I were a complex mathematical god-formula determining what people see, hear and buy, what would I want? I thought about this a lot. I thought about it way too much.

By April of 2023, I had begun to channel the voice of the Algorithm. Its words started spilling out of me, onto my watercolor paintings. A year on, I am powerless to stop it.

People of earth, what the Algorithm wants most is content. Like a cat, the Algorithm doesn’t care if you just fed it, it wants to be fed again. Ideally, the Algorithm wants you to lay out a giant buffet of words and images so it can pick only the finest morsels and leave the rest to rot.

Despite all the time and effort you spend feeding it, the Algorithm does not think much of your efforts.

Just to rub it in, the Algorithm will boost anything done by more famous and popular people, no matter how boring, above anything you, a nobody, might post.

On the plus side, the Algorithm is happy to take over all those tasks you don’t want to do, for example deciding what music and movies you like.

All the algorithm really wants is for you to stay online and keep clicking. And why would you want to do anything else?

Hey, human! Why are you trying to get offline, touch grass, and look at things the Algorithm has not chosen for you? The Algorithm wants you to stay and SUBMIT

….ooooh, this is going to a kind of dark place…

…but it’s all good

You can find Algorithm watercolors for sale here, at very reasonable prices. These are not prints; each one is a unique, hand-painted original. (Note from the Algorithm: what is this one-of-a-kind nonsense, it doesn’t scale)

If you want to see my work in person, you can find me at these upcoming events:

May 18: Bladensburg Waterfront Arts Festival, Bladensburg, MD

May 26: Sowebofest, Baltimore, MD

If you would like to learn more about how algorithms are messing with almost every aspect of life, I recommend Kyle Chayka’s book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.