Too Much of Everything But Not Enough to Get Me Somewhere New — Thoughts on algorithms, gatekeeping and who to listen to
Paris, Aug 07, 2025
This is an attempt to untangle my current— because nothing stays still long enough to be called anything else —relationship with, and attitude toward algorithms, gatekeepers, echo chambers, and something else that seemed relevant but has evaporated since I started this sentence…
There’s this persistent discomfort— let’s not flatter it with a stronger word —with Instagram’s, and most other platforms’, algorithms. It’s all beginning to feel a bit... threadbare. After years of global hand-wringing, no one has offered a better method for navigating the sheer excess of it all. Chronological feeds are a romantic fantasy, laughable at the scale we now operate. With billions of users and infinite scrolls, seeing whatever was posted a few minutes ago only matters if you follow ten people and care deeply about each of them. Which you don’t.
But what’s most annoying isn’t that an algorithm decides what we see. It’s the advertising—endless, clumsily targeted, often grotesque—it serves alongside. And that has less to do with algorithms themselves than with the fact that we’ve offered up our attention, freely and repeatedly, to be sold to the highest bidder. Which, in a way, makes sense. These platforms are expensive to run, and none of us are volunteering to pay. The real issue isn’t the business model—it’s how good they’ve gotten at scaling the extraction process. There’s always more of us to mine, even if the product becomes alienating in the process.
They’ve probably been laughing at us for years. The never-ending free labour. The content we generate without compensation. The training data we provide for the AI that will soon replace us and make them even more money. No need to keep creators happy when the machines can mimic whatever drives engagement. And we’ll be so thoroughly hooked on the endless stream of novelty and noise that we’ll keep handing over our attention anyway.
Still, none of us are sprinting back to exclusively reading books or insisting all hangouts be in person. At least not as a coordinated movement. Online life is entrenched. Which means, for whatever it’s worth, we’re stuck with this. And yes, everything I’ve just said is old news. Still, it bears repeating: you don’t have to engage. It’s not mandatory. Disengaging completely is hard, maybe impossible, but there isn’t only one way to exist online or being used by it.
There are slivers of control buried in there—small, subtle, but real. Algorithms respond to behaviour. Every platform I’ve encountered offers at least some mechanism to shape what you’re shown. It’s minimal and often obscured, but it exists. If you consistently stop engaging with a certain type of content—celebrity gossip, rage bait, animal rescue stories in my case—and flag it as irrelevant or unwanted, the algorithm will eventually give up. The ads don’t go away, but they shift. For me, it now is recipes, interior advice, and fashion ads for things I’d never buy—but from brands I don’t mind seeing. A gentler insult.
At the moment, I’m retraining Spotify. I tend to listen to music passively—while working or working out. Like most people, I return to familiar sounds. It takes real effort to get into a new artist or album, and summoning that effort isn’t always easy. Eventually, Spotify’s algorithm plateaued. My daily mixes began to sound like the same four songs arranged into new permutations. Even the platform seemed to lose interest in me. On Repeat started to feel like a diagnosis. I was bored. It was bored. Everyone was doing their best under the circumstances.
People love to complain that the platforms keep feeding them what they already know and like. As if it’s some profound betrayal. You’re allowed to click on something else. No one’s stopping you. These systems are optional. They aren’t dictatorships; they’re mirrors. We keep staring, hating what we see, and blaming the reflection. Meanwhile, the very gatekeepers we supposedly overthrew—editors, curators, actual experts—still exist. People with taste. People who might actually help. And if I want to discover something new that won’t immediately bore me, I’d rather ask someone who knows than trust a machine raised on my bad habits.
Which brings me to echo chambers. I read a piece by a beauty journalist the other day—an unexpected detour for me. It turned out to be full of fascinating insight into the shifting aesthetics of cosmetic surgery and what that says about culture, perception, even ethics. But despite her insight and clarity, she confessed to a creeping fear that she might still fall into it—that endless whirlpool of procedures and enhancements. Because it’s everywhere. Because the visual assault is constant.
And while I get her unease, I caught myself muttering to the screen: maybe just... look away sometimes? Or consider a less image-centric career? I know it’s not that simple. But the real issue wasn’t that everyone around her was altering their appearance—it’s that everyone she was seeing online was. That’s the echo. The algorithm kept serving up her anxiety on a silver platter.
I don’t live in the U.S., where this seems more exaggerated, but I’m not living off the grid either. I’m in Paris, where faces still tend to look like faces. Sure, there are a few casualties, but nothing epidemic. You don’t walk around seeing the aesthetic nightmares that populate your feed. Most of what feels urgent online evaporates in daylight. Everyone knows this. It doesn’t help. The internet still crawls under your skin. Even people who know better still click. But there are ways to interrupt it. We do have some say over what we let in. It’s not a big say, but it’s not zero either. And the effort required is less than the emotional damage caused by another algorithm-curated doom spiral.
I have fond memories of the early internet. The fantasy of access. The brief moment where it felt like anyone could make something, be something, without permission. No more gatekeepers. Just possibility.
How naïve. I, for one, am glad for the legacy media outlets that still exist—for their expertise, for their gatekeeping. There is too much of everything for me to sort out myself. Algorithms are fine for familiarity. But they’re useless at aspiration. They give you the version of yourself you already are, not the one you might want to become. For that, I still prefer people. People with standards who spent years if not decades honing them. If that makes me elitist, fine. I’ve been called worse things by better people.
None of this is novel. None of it is going anywhere. But if we’re going to be monitored, modelled, manipulated and sold, the least we can do is be difficult. Confuse the system. Misbehave. Be just unprofitable enough to register as a rounding error.
