The Algorithm of the Mind 📱
Knowing your own taste in the era of overconsumption.
I see the avatars of people I like and respect, people I think of as very smart, among the “likes” on posts where someone is making a bigger check than most people will ever see in their lives promoting commodity grain cereal. I see their avatars in the “likes” on a skinny woman’s bare torso, her head nowhere to be found in the image. I see their avatars in the “likes” on all sorts of posts that suggest an acceptance of a status quo regarding what is important in life: securing the bag, being thin, acquiring luxury items. I can blame corporately steered algorithms, or I can blame people’s own attention. Own desires. Own inability to define what is good and beautiful based on anything beyond money and status. It’s both.
You’ll find my avatar in the likes of things I probably would prefer not be publicly associated with—my affinities for high-end soaps, a fashion influencer based in Paris who gets around by bicycle and makes me think I fucked up by not getting the Simone Rocha Crocs, and Dries Van Noten, though, probably shock no one. I love beauty; I care about how I smell and what my “look” conveys to other people about me, though of course the context of a “look” depends on who’s perceiving it. Beauty is why I love food, why I take pictures of it, why I stage my tomatoes. I love people who create beauty. I appreciate people most who can see beauty even when it hasn’t been packaged and sold to them. Yet it’s difficult to discern a difference, and I’m being arrogant in thinking I can do so.
Corporate algorithmic power (the one where Instagram tells me good job! because it decided to show my selfie to more of my followers than it ever shows anything to do with my work, any still-life that I’ve let emerge from active-life) is some amalgamation of soft power and mind control. Totally Recommend wrote about how they stopped taking photos of people to instead curate in the way the app suggested, coming to regret how they’ve chosen to document their life for the sake of perception. “People buy certain goods, make pilgrimages to Marfa’s desert Prada store, and arrange their lives in certain ways to feel close to something,” writes Kieran McLean. The “something” is ephemeral—it’s the being perceived as feeling close to something, not the actual being, that’s the key.
Easier said than done to divorce ourselves from the imminence of corporate soft power, of course, its demand that we replicate rather than create: Rather than build a world in which to flex its soft power and cultural influence, social media companies build an algorithm that has the creators doing it for them. Chasing their own tail and someone else’s taste. We’re served something uncannily like what we do like but often not quite all the way there. In this tension, there’s buying power.
I’m critical of my own instincts toward beauty because of this. I find stainless steel coupes repugnant, but I can’t figure out a better reason for why than their ubiquity, the way they seemed to multiply across images and continents. But would I like them had I not known? Would I like them if I’d just been served some ice cream in one for dessert, never having encountered a fashionably grainy iPhone shot zoomed in on them filled with cream or affogato? I think under those circumstances, I would find them fun—delightful. But I never got to experience those circumstances. The coupes have no meaning outside my Explore page.
The whimsy of Gohar World has grown on me over time, though I find food “installations” wasteful. What are you doing with that chair made of bread, with that sculpture of butter, with the Gildas stuck into a baguette? I loved when I interviewed Allie Gelles of Cakes4Sport for T, who talked about making her sculptural cakes because they would be eaten: There was an impermanence to them; they wouldn’t be garbage. When does food-as-art simply become food waste? Are you making this for the people in the room or for the documentation of the people in the room?
“As the Information Revolution proceeds the myths, assumptions, and folklores of business become the common language of humanity; business culture becomes human culture. Working and consuming from our houses, wired happily into what Harper’s magazine has called the ‘electronic hive,’ we will each be corporate subjects—consumers and providers of ‘content’—as surely as were the hapless industrial proletarians of the last century,” wrote Thomas Frank in the essay “Dark Age” in The Baffler. It was published in 1994. Here we are! (And as Rene Ricard wrote in “The Radiant Child” in 1981: “We are no longer collecting art we are buying individuals.” The train left the station long ago, with a steam engine.)
“Business culture becomes human culture”—this is what I was thinking about when everyone was suddenly referring to the change of seasons by financial quarters. My Q1 photo dump… It’s what I’m always thinking about when people are told to continue to “slay” by promoting terrible vegan cheeses or pans that are going to end up in the garbage. At least they’re getting their bag! It’s what I’m thinking about when people thank a brand for inviting them to dinner. Corporations are people in this land, after all.
Do we have to buy into all of this to survive? I ask myself. The answer is a clear yes. I don’t know why I pretend otherwise when I know the going rate for not doing so. What I’m asking right now is: When you’re hitting the “heart,” are you tacitly endorsing a world in which nothing matters but money?
I used to think I was making my taste by reading lots of magazines and watching lots of movies and obsessing over music videos. I was absorbing in many ways an anti–mainstream taste that was nonetheless commodified and codified for me, no less a stooge for a corporate algorithm than young people now: I loved Jancee Dunn on M2 and Janeane Garofalo and Margaret Cho—my girlhood icons. I often feel like a vessel of a distinctly ’90s false promise. My whole way of being in the world, a time capsule. Lately I’ve been leaning into this by listening to the album I thought was the coolest ever when I got it for Christmas 1997: …The Dandy Warhols Come Down
Which is to say, we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with things to desire, to value, to find beautiful. The difference is in the time it took to wait for a new magazine to show up at the newsstand versus the next scroll on the toilet. It alters the pace of brains, as well as consumption. Even ten years ago, even five years ago, did anyone think they needed entirely new wardrobes to go on vacation? Ten years ago, five years ago, was it “normal” to participate in mass tourism that alters the character of destinations and reduces residents’ quality of life? Who created these standards? Who benefits from these standards?
There is a lack of clarity. (I always skipped the pages in magazines that said “advertisement” just like I scroll past “paid partnership” now.) It’s not teams at magazines curating; it’s individuals competing for eyes and clicks and dollars. People aren’t making a living off of the “content” they’re creating; they’re making a living off of how appealing said content is to the corporate algorithms, which reward sameness, and thus to brands with marketing budgets. There is great stuff everywhere, too, but what’s the cost? Business culture is human culture. And it makes a lot of people in the culture industry feel like they’re losing their minds.
I’ve said this before, a few different ways, and I think it bears repeating and re-interrogating. I have this newsletter, but I’m not really better off materially than I was years ago as a regular contributor to papers and magazines, even if I have more freedom and am doing better work. This is the creator economy tradeoff: predictable instability for unpredictable instability. I criticize corporate soft power and the fracturing of the media landscape because I’m in the strange position of being both its beneficiary and its victim. Because I watch so many people, day after day, seem to accept that this is it—this is just how we do things now.
I think it’s important to be endlessly aware and self-critical when scrolling takes up inevitable time in our lives—time that is well spent if we are using it well: to understand other people and culture better, to understand our tastes and desires, to just have a laugh or relate to someone. It’s hard to know what we really like in this world, what we’re really responding to when we see someone’s outfit and it looks like it jumped straight off of TikTok. It’s why food is so good for bringing us back to ourselves, to real life: we either like it or we don’t. You can’t pretend. It doesn’t matter how good it looked on social media or who got cut a check to sell it to you. On the palate, true taste.
Tonight will be the first paid subscriber writing chat, at 7 p.m. EST. I will be answering questions about writing and idea generation, and we’ll be sharing resources and reading with each other. I’m going to kick it off by talking about what I love and learn from in Adrienne Rich’s 1984 speech “Notes Toward a Politics of Location.”
This Friday, paid subscribers receive the monthly Recommends… post with a roundup of links, podcasts, audiobooks, and TV shows and movies I’ve enjoyed in the last few weeks. It also includes a playlist and a book giveaway—this week, it’ll be signed copies of my own No Meat Required, which just came out in paperback.
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If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, remember to scroll through The Desk Cookbook. I’ll be adding methods for how I make potato salad and home fries.
News
I have an essay in the sixth and final issue of MOLD titled “Conditional Consumption,” written in 2022 in anticipation of my book’s publication but coming out after!
Kevin Koczwara interviewed me about No Meat Required at his newsletter.
My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.
Reading
Real Estate by Deborah Levy — it’s almost too on the nose for current crises in my life
Alicia, the point and sentiment and thinking and writing in this piece resonated in general, of course, but if it's okay I'd love to comment on one particular part because it's something I've been considering and toying with and figuring out my feelings on a lot the past couple of years - the discourse around using the internet or choosing to bow out of using the internet, and that there's a certain admiration of those who announce that they aren't online etc.
You wrote: "I think it’s important to be endlessly aware and self-critical when scrolling takes up inevitable time in our lives—time that is well spent if we are using it well: to understand other people and culture better, to understand our tastes and desires, to just have a laugh or relate to someone."
This is a very important and true note, and I'm glad to see you say it. It feels like there's a narrative these days that using the internet is this embarrassing or shameful thing, and that we're all going to pass away mindlessly scrolling some bullshit. It isn't shameful to scroll. It isn't shameful to become addicted to an addictive thing. But, when we have the wherewithall, the awareness, the strength etc, we can choose to manipulate that addiction (and it's an addiction that is maybe inevitable for many in a world where technology moved faster than the human brain has the ability to comprehend and we were in it before we understood it) and use it in a way that suits us. Rather than try to avoid maybe being in unhealthy situations, it's kind of more realistic, more of what living entails, to get into them, to learn from them, and how to best manage them. We have the privilege of choice and discipline around how we use the internet - it isn't this thing that we should be afraid of or behave as if it's in charge of us. And when we can figure out how to do that, the internet can be used in an important and joyful way.
Sorry for being on a tangent that's only slightly about what you wrote. It's just so boring when people are so black and white about the internet; this narrative that it's irredeemably negative and we were better off when we didn't have it and we should all go on a bike ride instead of be on the internet. The internet is a reality of current life, and we can absolutely choose not to engage with it if that suits us better, but there's no denying the loss that comes with that choice, just like every choice. Because, as you said so well, if we're using it well, the internet enriches our lives, our brains, our souls. I would never have come across your newsletter, other writers, favourite music and films and TV shows without it - and, yes, maybe I would have been fine because I wouldn't have known any better - but I'm glad I came across all of those things.
Managing time and attention in a way that suits what we want and need from life is a better way to live than just disregard everything offhand - it shows a lack of curiosity about the world, about culture, about each other to be so proud of yourself for hating the internet and not giving a shit about what goes on there because you're so happy out offline. (And, I am happier offline in many ways, so I get it!). But, I'm also unhappier in many ways when I don't have access to certain things that the internet provides - and, so, it's a case of figuring out how to engage with something that you love and need and appreciate but that is bad for you in some ways. Like with most things, this is just the deal of being alive - figuring out how to make the mess and chaos suit you.
You had me at 1994 Baffler. Looking forward to reading this at least 3 more times.