Anti-algorithm
On longing for connection, not consumption
A few years ago, I had an astrology reading from the astonishing and insightful Alice Sparkly Kat (whose services I highly recommend, if y’all are interested in that sort of thing) wherein I learned about my nodes. You see, the lunar nodes are interesting places in a birth chart, frequently described as a karmic or cosmic axis that runs through your chart.
I like to think of them as the bane and the balm of my artistic wound.
I’m not educated enough to write about karma or destiny or the cosmos, but astronomically speaking, the lunar nodes are the points in space where the moon crosses our planet’s elliptic. Visually speaking, these are the times of the year when we witness eclipses on Earth, both solar and lunar. There are two sets of eclipses every year (although they are not always visible from every place on our planet). Astrologically speaking, these points where the two heavenly bodies cross paths are very powerful indeed.
It’s strange to be read for filth by astrology. As per Alice Sparkly Kat’s article about Taurus north node/Scorpio south node (emphasis mine):
People with Scorpio south node often feel as though they are expected to explain everything and, yet, that they are unable to explain anything. This leads to the feeling of being totally misunderstood. [. . .] The reason why Scorpio south node people have a fear of being misunderstood is because they have a fear of not being trusted. The reason why they have a fear of not being trusted is not because they cannot earn trust because, very often, these people are great at building trust in their relationships, but because they have a hard time trusting their own motives for making life decisions.
So much of the reason I write is to make myself comprehensible, to avoid being lost in translation. But I am forever and always questioning the reason why I publish. What is this if not having a hard time trust my own motives? Am I published because I want validation? Because I want success? Or is it, as I keep telling myself, that I want to make genuine connections with people?
Of course, there is nothing wrong with publishing for validation. There is nothing wrong with publishing for success. And yet I can’t shed the feeling that I’m somehow a bad person for wanting those things—no, worse than bad, cringe.
I’m bad at celebrating myself. I am bad at talking about myself. As much as I write to be understood, it’s hard to shed my inclination toward privacy, to keeping that cringe to myself. Again, as per Alice Sparkly Kat:
The north node in the fourth house hungers for one thing—privacy. Oh, sweet privacy! Privacy is a place where no one knows what you are doing. It’s a place where you are allowed to experiment and play and fuck up without having to experience some kind of social death over it. It’s a place where you are protected from the opinions of other people, a place where you protect yourself from the opinions of other people.
It’s strange, being a person who does not like to be witnessed in any way, feeling forced to be public for a performance. I don’t mind performance; like any good theater kid, when called upon, I can do an entire song-and-dance routine for you.1 I just don’t like performing in public all the time.
And that’s what it feels like social media has reduced me to.
If you follow me on any social media platform (I don’t count Substack as a social media platform), you’ll notice that I haven’t been posting much, if at all. In the past month, it was because I was eyeballs deep in drafting GUARDIANS 3, but there’s a bigger reason for it all.
I’m bored.
There’s nothing personal about the accounts that crop up with any regularity on my feeds, nothing that hooks my interesting, nothing but content. I hate that social media has been reduced merely to something that gives me value, but it increasingly feels as though accounts are engaging in what essentially amounts to an engagement hustle: generating content for views and interactions instead of…sharing things that interest us? I spend less and less time on Instagram these days, I’ve cut out TikTok more or less entirely—not only in terms of posting, but of spending actual time on these apps. My screen time notifications from my Apple devices tell me that I’m spending 15%—17%—21% less and less time as the weeks go by. Surprisingly, the only social media platform I spend the most time on these days is Twitter (I refuse to call it X)—again, not posting, but lurking—because it’s sort of the only place where I reliably come across something funny or entertaining instead of something RELENTLESSLY catered to my personal algorithm. I’m ADHD; I’m motivated by novelty, and most platforms aren’t serving me that sweet, sweet dopamine hit of something different, something new.
In the end, I suppose it comes down to what I use social media for, and what I get out of social media. Even though I should probably be using my social media as a brand platform, I keep resisting. Part of this is because I am personally bored of seeing all my peers use social media as a brand platform. Nothing against using it that way—again, we must all subject ourselves to the engagement grind occasionally—it’s just that I miss seeing a person behind the content. Well, maybe not a person—a personality.
Every other post on Instagram is an ad, but what may or may not be worse is that I can no longer distinguish the ads from the posts from the people I actually follow. What am I even doing here when I can’t see posts from my friends about their cats? As a matter of fact, what are people who are following me on social media doing here?
I used to think that social media was a place where people already engaged with my work learn more about me. But more and more, I’m going to understand that that’s not how social media actually works. Social media is, in fact, an echo chamber, and I don’t mean it in the sense that we are all talking about the same things to the same group of people. No, what social media does is incentivize the user (I hate being called a user, but there it is) to share content in order to get engagement. This in turn leads to a cycle where content that gets more engagement is created by the user and pushed by the algorithm, and so on and so forth.
I think back to my middle school days, when having social capital was perhaps the most fraught and the most important. Back when it seemed imperative that I be popular, which mean making sure I was up to date on the latest trends, the latest looks, the latest accessories, etc. all in a bid to become part of a cultural conversation. But the problem with popular is that we forget that popular is not original nor innovative; it is a copy of a copy of a copy. And all for what? All views and likes on a post tell you is in which box the algorithm can neatly put you. The saves count does not matter more than the quality of engagement, nor is the number of followers a sort of shorthand for worth, like a Forbes list where attention is reduced to a sort of currency.
[Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds] have flattened their on-screen personas into the same, repeatable formula every time. [. . . .] Over the past six or seven years, Johnson and Reynolds have narrowed their movie roles into nearly identical personas that they keep across all their movies, ensuring brand consistency.
—Patrick H. Willems, When Movie Stars Become Brands
Right now, I’m at a place where I feel like my social media is the product I consume, not the books I read or write. This is why social media can often like a whole other job in addition to writing. People are coming to your social media not for your work, but for the value your content brings to them. Tips/tricks? Hacks? Writing advice? That’s what they’re consuming, not art. And I want to make art, as pretentious as that sounds. Not high art, but art nonetheless. I want to make things with a Point, a vision, a perspective.
And that includes the things I share on social media.
What does this practically mean moving forward? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. I keep going back to missing Livejournal and wanting to treat my social media the way I used to write little entries back in 2003. I take photographs, have random thoughts, and only a few of them actually have to do with Being an Author. I’m just going to dub all those posts “anti-algorithm” because I’m really tired of having to do the entire song-and-dance for attention. I might be able to sing all the parts (ALL the parts) of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera for you, but I don’t feel like it most of it time.
And that’s okay.
Just ask me and I will perform the entirety of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. All the parts. ALL the parts!