In Frank Herbert’s, Dune the desert planet of Arrakis is home to colossal sandworms. These creatures grow to be hundreds of metres long and the largest is around 80 metres in diameter. The blind worms hunt by detecting rhythmic sounds on the sand. The only way to escape their notice as you travel over the deserts of the planet is to ‘walk without rhythm’.
After reading Dune for the first time, I spent the greater part of a weekend in our backyard trying to ‘walk without rhythm’. It was later that I came across Monty Python and the Ministry of Silly Walks and I always believed that the Empire in Dune would have benefited by having a Ministry of Silly Walks.
The point
I read this article by Douglas Rushkoff a few months back. In the article Rushkoff explains that the best way for us to escape the algorithms, the ‘A.I.s and the other enforcers of social control’ is by each one of us being our true, strange selves. And I love this idea. Algorithms and A.I.s all work because we conform, because we try to be like one another. And the more similar we are the more accurately these algorithms will be able to predict what will keep us engaged, change our behaviour and, in the end, make us easier to control.
The Googles, Amazons and Facebooks use algorithms solve problems. The problem they coded the algorithms to solve for is; ‘how do we keep people engaged on our channel’? And the algorithms solved for it by taking in all our browsing data, recognising what content keeps us scrolling and feeding us more of it. I wrote this post explaining how social media is designed to be addictive.
Now, from what I can tell, there are two ways for us to stop these ‘enforcers of social control’. The first is to pressure our governments to legislate against the use of engagement algorithms that rely on outrage and extremism to keep us glued to our phones. The second is, we all become our true, weird and unique selves. We have to stop conforming and stump the algorithms by each one of us becoming exceptions, outliers, the truest versions of ourselves. As Rushkoff says;
“A.I.s and other enforcers of social control can’t follow what they can’t categorize. Weirdness is power, dissolving false binaries and celebrating the full spectrum of possibility. Eccentricity opens the gray area where mutations develop and innovations are born.”
We become free when we stop being like others, when we walk without rhythm. When you stop marching with everybody else, the sandworms can’t get you. The machines that decide what goes into your feed are the sandworms. They detect patterns and hunt ways to capture your precious attention, stealing your life in scrolling increments.
Weirdness is how we overcome the algorithms
Weirdness is the answer because our governments are legislating for the insignificant. Our governments are currently making a big deal about online privacy. Which translates into legislation that limits a company’s ability to track what you are doing and buying on their website and then using that data to serve you ads that are relevant to what you were looking at. They are basically ensuring that online ads are more annoying and less relevant than what they are now.
Before I get inundated with messages, let me be clear – I do believe that our online privacy should be protected.
However, I don’t see it being the biggest issue our digital society faces right now. We have media platforms sowing fear, normalising extremism and encouraging division in our societies. Ads that follow us across the internet aren’t swaying the outcomes of elections, or delivering audiences to bigots and idiots. The data training the algorithms isn’t the problem. It’s the algorithms and the A.I.s themselves that we need to be taking a closer look at. However, until our politicians understand this, the best weapon we have is weirdness.
Walk without rhythm
It is Socrates who said that all philosophical imperatives could be distilled down to one edict, know thyself. And the older I get (did I mention I had a birthday last week?) the more I realise that being thyself is just as important. Don’t aspire to be different – just like all your friends, instead, just be who you are. If you want to escape the suffering, the control and the sandworms, then know who you are, and be that unique, strange, and amazing individual.