the feed is working as intended

i've lived a lot of my life online, and still do. i’m writing this partly as a therapy exercise, and partly because i got caught up in this stuff when it was just getting going. now it feels like the whole internet runs on it.

i grew up having my politics recommended to me between gaming videos. a very normal way to develop a worldview.

around 2014, i got drawn into gamergate: a harassment campaign aimed mostly at women in gaming, packaged as ethics in video game journalism. a lot of young men, including me, bought the packaging.

gaming gradually became politics. feminism was the problem. actually, political correctness was the problem. actually, immigration was bad, and somehow this meant donald trump should be president?

each step felt close enough to the last that i didn't notice how far i'd travelled. fortunately, i stopped at insufferable 16-year-old libertarian.

i didn't experience it as radicalisation. i was being bullied at school, and most of my social life already happened through a screen. in one tab, i was watching increasingly right-wing content. in another, i was questioning my sexuality and exploring queer and furry communities, whilst calling them cringe to my friends.

the politics gave me somewhere to belong, things to feel certain about and people to blame. a substantial amount of it was probably self-hatred. i needed to believe i wasn't one of them. i was normal. i was on the right side of the joke.

cruelty was part of the appeal. it gave me somewhere to direct feelings i couldn't accept yet. leaving that out would make this story much too flattering to me.

by 2017, cracks were showing. climate change denial made me question people i'd trusted, who were clearly wrong about something important and seemed determined to stay wrong.

but the biggest change was going to university and finding friends i could be myself around. suddenly i was surrounded by the woke libs i was supposed to hate, and they were lovely.

i'm more settled now. i lean left, distrust the certainty i used to find comforting, and find a lot of online discourse exhausting. none of that makes me immune to getting sucked in again.

especially when the feed now follows you everywhere.

i used to go on social media to keep up with people and things i'd chosen to follow. increasingly, i open an app and it decides what i'm interested in. tiktok, reels, shorts. probably your banking app eventually.

i've found artists, communities and ideas i love this way. the internet helped me understand myself whilst also teaching me to hate the people i recognised myself in. both things happened.

but what keeps me watching isn't always what i'm glad i watched. sometimes it's anger, insecurity or something i can't look away from. half an hour gone, and all i've learnt is that someone, somewhere, is being awful.

there's money behind getting this stuff onto our screens. clavicular, for example, said kick paid to promote clips of his streams across other platforms. what looks like something everyone is spontaneously talking about can also be an advert. sharing it in disgust still helps it travel.

at the ugliest end, strangers get dragged into the entertainment. they're harassed for an audience that can close the tab and move on. they have to live with what happened.

and it all arrives in the same format. something horrible, jokes underneath, then a cooking video. another thing that happened on your phone.

irony makes this easier. i used it myself. if you're only joking, you don't have to explain what you believe. if someone's hurt, they didn't get it. if you're challenged, you never cared anyway. you just spent three hours watching, sharing and defending it.

i don't think everyone who watches this stuff ends up believing it. but repetition can change what feels normal, what seems funny and whose humiliation counts as entertainment. laughing along helped me belong. belonging made it harder to question anything.

i was lonely and ashamed of myself. the content gave those feelings an explanation and somewhere to go. being accepted meant finding someone else to look down on.

creators get an audience, platforms get attention, political actors get people spreading their message. nobody needs to be coordinating it all for those interests to line up.

that's what i mean by the feed working as intended. it can make money whilst leaving you angrier, lonelier and less able to understand the world. the damage doesn't have to be the point for it to be an acceptable cost.

there's not a neat answer. “just log off” feels inadequate when so much friendship and community happens online, especially for people who can't easily find it elsewhere.

but i can go directly to people whose work i value. spend time in smaller communities. let an outrageous clip pass without finding it another audience. ask whether i'm enjoying myself, learning anything or connecting with anyone. or just spending the evening getting angry at strangers.

i rely on social media to keep in touch with people, so i’ve been trying to make it less easy to get sidetracked. i tailor my feed, and beeper helps by bringing messages from different apps into one place. i can reply to someone on instagram without opening instagram, which saves me finding out what the reels tab has planned for me.

i still get sucked into scrolling late at night, so this is very much a work in progress. but i want to keep the people without giving the apps quite so much of my life. ideally i could reply to a friend, put my phone down and go to sleep. some fairly ambitious plans there.