Dear Algorithm...
This was the year the Zeitgeist turned on you. Are you OK?
Dear Algorithm,
I’d love to tell you what I’m wishing for from you in 2025. But first, I feel like we need to talk about you.
Are you OK? I mean, for real? Because it has been a blisteringly bad year for you and your family. They don’t get much rougher than this one.
I know, I know: at the end of 2023, you were riding high. Things had never looked better for you. You were busier than you’ve ever been. You’d infiltrated a staggering array of platforms and online tools, working invisibly to puppeteer the interests, purchases, trending videos, cocktail party chatter, financial investments, rizziest memes, political affiliations, news preferences, and romantic partners of billions of people across the globe. And think of the squintillions of targeted ads you served them all, and the personal data you gobbled up! You’d have had the entire world at your feet, if only you had feet.
True, at the end of 2023 the critic Jason Farago argued in The New York Times Magazine that “culture has come to a standstill” because of you, which must have stung. But, being an algorithm, you decided to bury that snippet of bad press. One of the many perks of controlling almost everything we see online, amirite?
That black eye, however, was just the opening salvo; 2024 has been a non-stop beatdown from start to finish.
It began with an absolute gut punch: in January, New Yorker writer
published Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, which took Farago’s critique to its logical conclusion. Filterworld shone an uncomfortably bright light on the ubiquitous, homogenizing influence you have on virtually every aspect of modern culture, from which TV shows get made and which books are published to the isolating tendencies of an algorithmic-led society and the blandly converging details of coffee shop aesthetics around the world.Chayka’s book got a lot of attention. Suddenly, many of us were asking ourselves why we like what we like, buy what we buy, believe what we believe, and boink whom we boink, ultimately begging the question of where individual taste even comes from. (Spoiler for the foreseeable future: you).
And you, my friend, after years of being either adored or ignored, quickly became the object of an awkward amount of chin-scratching scrutiny.
Chayka even coined a catchy new term, “algorithmic anxiety,” to describe, on one hand, the way you pressure artists and other content creators to shape their work in ways that feed you and your algorithmic brethren what you want instead of their audiences — essentially perverting the whole ecosystem of authentic artistic expression (assuming that was ever a real thing). And on the flip side, it’s shorthand for the modern Internet user’s unease that she must constantly contend with and anticipate machine estimations of her desires.
On the promotional tour for his book, Chayka doubled down:
“‘Algorithmic’ has become a byword for anything that feels too slick, too reductive, or too optimized for attracting attention.”
Dude. Things are looking bad when your own name becomes the go-to synonym for TTH.
Grabbing the baton from Chayka, Rebecca Jennings at Vox aimed a few well-placed kicks in your direction with a deep dive into your pernicious influence on artistic culture
“While Big Tech sites like Spotify claim they’re ‘democratizing’ culture, they instead demand artists engage in double the labor to make a fraction of what they would have made under the old model … Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.”
“Tyranny”?! Yeesh.
Not satisfied there, Jennings piled on by blaming you for the collapse of ad-supported journalism and the crumbling relevance of cultural criticism at large. All that matters for aspiring artists now, she observed, is algorithmic optimization and the constant, never-ending task of branding and self-promotion.
But all of this was just foreplay for what came next: in March, social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which fell like a meteor strike on your already shat-upon spring vibes.
Over the course of 400 research-packed pages, Haidt maintained that record numbers of modern kids are anxious, depressed, and suicidal because — how do I put this gently? — because of you. Haidt argued that giving children access to addictive social media and recommendation algorithms is driving them quite literally insane.
Haidt observes — correctly, let’s be honest — that your job is a) to keep us clicking, scrolling and swiping at all costs, and b) to increase the virality of social media posts, which optimizes a). The inevitable outcome of this inhumane alchemy is what we see today not just in a mental health crisis among youth but in record levels of political polarization and the collapse of consensus reality.
Yes, I know, you love kids. But when the adults start looking at you funny because of how much time you’re spending with their children, maybe it’s time to dial it back a smidge?
This was also the year that revealed algorithms like you are not in fact “neutral” and error-free automatons that eliminate the scourge of human bias. The truth that emerged in 2024 is that you are busy inventing completely new sorts of systemic bias — against poor people, against people of color, against people who don’t conform to patriarchal societal norms, and so many more.
The upshot: if someone is already in a vulnerable group, they have little chance of making headway against the median of the data you algorithms have calibrated yourselves upon. That data, just like the real world, privileges the mainstream, the normative, the white and heterosexual, the perfectly abled, the rich, and whatever remains of the middle class.
In other words, you favor the plump, jiggling center of the U.S. population’s shapely bell curve; everyone and everything else is irrelevant.
And the hits just kept on coming. In March (we’re only at March!) Google overhauled its search algorithm, sending the whole internet into fits. The less immediate effect was to relegate both major publications and small and independent sites to 100th page search results and make Reddit, Wikipedia and Instagram the defacto authorities for just about everything.
The kerfuffle also dragged a giant yellow highlighter over the degree to which Google’s search results are highly arbitrary and subject to creepy algorithmic (that’s you) manipulation.
Basically, you entered the summer with a massive target and crosshairs on your back that screamed Blame me! And hoo boy did they.
T.M. Brown, for example, writing at The Atlantic, archly observed that algorithms like you aren’t just being used to pimp preferred content and tilt search results. You’re responsible for so, so much more that’s happening under the hood and out of the public eye. As they put it:
“[Algorithms] are also employed to fix real-estate prices, make probation and asylum decisions, determine Uber prices during a hurricane, dictate whether elderly people receive potentially lifesaving medical care, select rental tenants, assess the risk posed by an abusive partner, and decide who gets targeted in a war zone.”
If you expected things to improve with the end of summer, you were in for a nasty surprise: In September, a nationwide poll of teens revealed that close to half said they wished major social media platforms had never been invented. And honestly? They sounded like they meant it.
All this attention very quickly transformed into judgment. You were blamed for Instagram Face and for the Spotify-pleasing circumcision of pop music songs. You were slammed for the TikTokification and JoeRoganization of the news, and not unfairly for Hawk Tuha Girl. You were scapegoated for turning all of culture into a cesspool of passivity and sameness where the unconventional and challenging gets downranked into unseen oblivion by default.
With the arrival of November and the long awaited U.S. election, it looked like you and your algorithmic cohort might close out the year on a high note of triumph, after having bludgeoned reason, fact-based reality, civility — and oh, yes, democracy — into smithereens in service of your social media overlords. Redemption! Retribution!
But the party was short lived. Immediately following the election, your buzz was burst in a half dozen different ways.
First, tens of millions fled the Mad Max-ian wastelands of X/Twitter for the upstart alternative Bluesky. Why the X-odus? Because Bluesky offers a haven away from the control of algorithmic feeds, where users can see and engage with only the posts they choose. Duh.
It was a slap in the face for you, to be sure. Did the few millions who decamped to Bluesky represent more than a pittance of the legion of lives over which you continue to exert such control? No. But it further erased the shadows in which you operate, and again made you the topic of conversation, something that you and your masters wish fervently to avoid.
November was still getting its pants on when Australia blindsided you with a ban on social media for all children under the age of 16. Their justification? Just like the man said, you’re driving kids crazy. And not in the cool way.
Not to be outdone, in mid-December, the state of New York passed a new law curbing social media algorithms for users under 18.
The wording of the law specifically called you out by name, prohibiting social media platforms “from providing addictive, algorithm-based feeds to children under 18 without parental consent.” Yeah, they made it personal.
The end of the year also saw the enshrinement of two new words that place the blame for a great deal of what ails society directly at your feet: “enshittification” and “brain rot.”
You were faulted for the way users’ collective experience on most social platforms has been deprioritized and degraded in service of endless “growth” and ever-increasing profits, while at the same time using you to maximize “engagement.”
And, hey, I hear you. “Enshittification” feels just deliberately hurtful. Sure, it sucked to be a user of social media platforms this year, but from your POV, the users are nothing more than feed corn for the real shot-callers: the platform owners, investors, and shareholders, who were rolling in profits this year thanks to you.
With “brain rot” they also slagged you for the sneaky ways you and your algorithmic brethren conspire to keep users addicted to these same platforms — doomscrolling, trolling, and rage-posting until their fingers give out.
Brain rot also implicated the way you cocoon each individual user in a comforting, personalized echo chamber that reifies and perpetuates their most cherished beliefs and political ideologies, no matter how disconnected from decency and objective reality they may be.
You could almost feel it happening, the Zeitgest tipping away from you and toward a world in which you be you’d viewed as a mustache-twirling villain, if only you had a mustache.
December also saw filmmaker Kirby Ferguson, of Everything is a Remix fame, doing his thing for a New York Times video op/ed: “Is creativity dead?” he asked. “Everything looks the same, sounds the same, is the same.” Ferguson argued that algorithms bury anything truly innovative or unorthodox, “but what if, beneath the surface of mainstream culture, there was a world of wild imagination waiting to be discovered — if only a powerful force would stop suppressing it?” That powerful force? Yep, that’s you: creativity killer, brain rotter, enshittifier.
Then, just weeks before you could drag yourself across the finish, disaster: you suffered a catastrophic kneecapping from basically every Spotify subscriber in the world. They rose up in dismay and indignation over the AI-forward Spotify Wrapped that was dumped like a Pink Pilates Princess-shaped turd on gazillions of bewildered listeners.
Granted, as an algorithm, you could tell yourself this wasn’t your problem; this was all your new colleague, AI!
But it quickly became your problem, as the work you do constraining and guiding listening tastes toward the formulaic and the insipid, and inducing artists to produce the same, was quickly re-highlighted and amplified in the torrents of opprobrium being dished out. (And trust me, AI’s moment in the hot seat is coming.)
“Remember Filterworld?” the people wailed. “Whatever happened to human curation? This is the algorithms’ fault!”
The Spotify fiasco kicked off a bandwagon’s worth of articles suggesting that algorithms have “killed the joy of music discovery” (ouch), instructing readers on How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm, and celebrating the rise of an anti-algorithm music counterculture.
Suddenly, what you previously had known as a listless, pliable population of effort-averse scrollers and streamers appeared to be reconsidering whether actual flesh-and-blood human beings might have a role in “curating” our music, our news, our purchases, our sexual partners and future spouses. (Side note: a key principle of Substack is to enable just such human curation.) All potentially putting you, my friend, out of a job.
And yet the year wasn’t quite finished with you. Just days before Christmas, Harper’s Weekly dropped an article from its January issue from author and investigative reporter Liz Pelly uncovering Spotify’s secretive project to seed its algorithm with anonymously bland, pre-fabbed music tracks to avoid having to pay actual artists. We also learned that Spotify’s “Discovery Mode” is in fact a payola-like program whereby artists accept a lower royalty rate — already mere fractions of a penny per stream — in exchange for algorithmic promotion. Your fault? It’s not for me to say, but your optics are definitely in the toilet right now.
With 2025 upon on us, your reputation is in tatters. Is there any hope you can expect better for the coming year?
Well, in just a few weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear whether a ban on TikTok violates the First Amendment. You can fully expect all eyes will be on you for that whole trial, friend. It’s not impossible that they show up with torches and pitchforks.
Even Substack’s preeminent cultural critic
couldn’t resist giving you a whack on the way out the door, calling social media platforms “the next dying malls.” And Ted Gioia likes everyone.I’m afraid I’m inclined to agree with him. Your hold on the Zeitgeist is slipping fast, and although you’re not going to be out of work anytime soon, your days of unchecked privilege and power may be numbered. As Gioia puts it:
“Maybe these apps for addicts will flourish for a few more years. But healthy, sane people are already wary, and their ranks are growing. So I anticipate that we will soon reach peak social media penetration—just as we achieved peak mall penetration back in the 1990s.
“Other forces in society will displace these deadening artificial communities. I’m still not sure what shape these alternatives will take (although I have a few ideas), or the pace of their ascendancy. But I hope to be part of them.”
Deep breaths, OK? Try not to think about the pending federal antitrust lawsuits against Google, Meta, and Amazon that will conclude in 2025. You’re pretty certain to be the fall guy there, too.
In the meantime! Would you mind connecting me with the people and forces Ted Gioia is describing?
Thanks, algorithm. I guess I’ll see you in 2025. But — if I’m being real? — not if I can help it.
Sharbaugh writes with insight, humor, and clarity about how greedy execs use algorithms to exploit users, artists, journalists and all consumers of culture (and culture itself) for profit. At a time when society most needs the civilizing balm of culture, his diagnosis/prescription is most appreciated. Thanks.
Seriously good article. Really thought provoking, and entertaining. You've just added significantly to my 2025 reading list.