Patricia Lockwood’s new book explores how we define ourselves inside social media. How we struggle to identify with who we are, in a world where we receive information that steals our time and intrudes our interests.
This is the first in a series about how we have lost control of ourselves through the pandemic.
Lockwood reflects on how our lives are being shaped by social media. Specifically how information is organised around our online selves.
Her debut novel takes place both online and in the physical world. Scenes jump between the two as regularly as one paragraph follows another. The style mimics how our lives flicker between a screen and the world in which the screen exists.
“Mostly though, is passed into you, you, you, you, until she had no idea where she ended and the rest of the crowd began.”
Echoes of Lear, “Never, never, never, never.”
I stopped.
***
That rolling interaction has created a body of data that we update with each scroll, each click, each pause. The articles, comments, pictures and videos pushed in our direction. Designed to predict what we want to see.
Engineering so refined, it presents us with information that we must click-on. A tool built on thousands of data points to anticipate our behaviour. A system so adept that it can forecast your wants, even if they were aroused by offline conversations. Where we discuss something with a friend over the phone, only for that same thing to be presented as a suggestion the next day. Users have suspected that this is surveillance capitalism, where calls are being secretly recorded. Apparently this is just the algorithm’s level of performance. Frightening. With personal data it’s not the sharing of browsing information that unsettles, but more so the relaying back of that information in the form of advertising or just general platform entrapment.
At first you notice how a pair of trainers follow you around from page to page. I ignore them until they go away. Shoes that stalk me are not going to find themselves on my feet, I think.
The algorithms are designed to retain users on any app. They build themselves using parts of the person. It’s like someone moving into you life, listening to all the musicians you once followed. Talking about things in which you had a fleeting interest. Painting the scenery that surrounds you with your own desires and intrigues. So much of it you would never know was artificial, only occasionally does something look too ripe. Or it knows you better than you know yourself, and leads you to a place further than you’d actively seek out. Boy, did I walk this far? Wow I lost track of myself.
We used to joke about musical wormholes on YouTube. You would embark with a clip and two hours later recommendations from other users’ behaviour would lead you down a path of exploration and intrigue. I’d arrive at videos and marvel at the journey, reflecting back on the road traveled. It still happens, but a move away from music videos for smaller artists has meant that there’s less to explore on the platform. Inexplicably I’m subscribed to a channel that posts tractors in the Punjab, pimped out with party soundsystems. A pinnacle moment in anyone’s browsing history.
***
Comedian and actor Pete Davidson appears eating an increasingly hot selection of chilli sauces until his nose runs wet and there’s no milk left to drink. How did I get here? Is this really what I’m interested in? He speaks of when he was on Instagram and got heavily into fashion. At that moment in his life he thought everyone approached dressing in this way. He picks up a napkin to hold back the leak. His face is an explosion from the devilled chicken. This is his moment where the system has taken him somewhere he wouldn’t consciously want to go.
I have studied life’s inanities. I spent a sleepless night watching every Darlene Love appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. YouTube knows this. Open the app after 23:30 and I’ll not be far from some Letterman compilation. Hooked again watching a supercut of Meg Parsont on the show. I’m struggling to get the humour. Meg is a fairly private person that was singled-out. She routinely worked late in the office block across from the TV studio. Unbeknownst to her, she’s to become the subject of a repeated bit. She is cajoled into divulging her private life, as part of some in-joke that the producers were playing with the network at the time. It’s a raw, rude comedy that I try to contextualise. Screen weary at three am.
With access to the full online portal, with everything clickable, that everything is now a reflection of who I am. And that person will be played back at me. If I click on one site the algorithm knows I’m the type of person who reads this. That article is now a part of who I am, it’s me in the data. It will be used to engineer my online life. To keep my online.
Socially a click is no longer a thing of frivolous convenience. If the user has endless choice then peers will be able to assign a greater degree of moral value to that choice. We are collectively becoming hyper conscious that our clicking is a reflection of who we are.
The algorithm continues to play this game. The chastisement is a feature.
It’s becoming difficult to know whether my online presence is elevating me to a position of independence, or just making me more subservient to the algorithm.
I need to spend more time on the Google Chrome app reading articles and watching videos. ‘Don’t make the same mistake again’. I hear the threat. ‘Don’t make bad decisions because you weren’t online enough.’
How am I meant to trust something whose intention it is to keep me retained on its platform? Does it need me to be financially solvent and stable, or will any thumbed phone do? What interests does it have in my health?
Your screentime was up 12% last week.
***
Hesitant to provide guidance Lockwood provides a framework for us to think through the problem. She uses a pregnancy and birth in the novel as counterpoint to the loss of self to the portal. This birth allows us to measure our online lives with what happens in the flesh. To apply our own value judgement to the two realms.
One of the reasons for reigniting this blog was to have this moment to think. To go into the books like Patricia’s and see where that takes me. It’s not that I’m up for a dialogue or to broadcast my writing. More so that I can hide from the algorithm and carve out my own internal world.
I believe the pandemic, coupled with the algorithm has made us confront who we are and how we organise our lives. It is a blessing for me at least that it has provided the space to undertake such a reorganisation.
What Lockwood powerfully shares with us is a depiction of how these grand problems of language, algorithm and power sit alongside very personal tragedies. Alongside each other the frustration and the futility of how we are powerless to the grand and the intimate. How future and trivial web algorithms may seem. She earnestly places the two alongside the other, in what seems less of a judgement and more of a holy fuck overwhelming sense of fear about how the world is unfolding before us.
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