Unfiltered

Unfiltered thoughts are a beautiful thing. I think that’s in part why
people enjoy long-form conversations, or the unhinged
stuff that kids will say from time to time. You can’t self-censor for
three hours straight, and kids haven’t developed the ability to
self-censor in the first place.

The current world is a filtered world. There are certain things that are
kosher when it comes to evening news, and other things that are kosher
when it comes to what’s being discussed on X (what used to be twitter),
and YouTube, and all these other platforms.

On the one hand it’s the Overton window and various political agendas,
on the other hand it’s “the algorithm” (and again, various political
agendas. Mixed in with business interests and other stuff, but hey,
there’s hardly any difference between business and politics these days,
so: potato, potahto.)

The algorithm.

Everyone is catering to “the algorithm.”

Algorithms are useful, no doubt about it. What they are not is an
end-all and be-all thing that can tell you what to think about, what to
care about.

The hyper-optimized algo feeds we find ourselves in are pretending to
show us what is relevant, but they are not optimized for us, they are
optimized against us. Our nervous system is the training data, our ego
and our vices are the knobs to tweak and levers to pull.

Even worse: “the algorithm” creates audience capture without much of an
audience. It creates self-censorship and a chilling effect of ungodly
proportions, since everyone is trying to satisfy “the algorithm” instead
of satisfying their soul.

What a soulless world we’ve created. And to what end? Reach? Influence?
Daily active users, which, of course, is just a different word for
addiction?

I can’t help but think of the letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to the
kids of Xavier High School a mere 20 years ago:

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting,
sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or
badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to
find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

—Kurt Vonnegut

Whatever “the algorithm” does, there is one thing it does not: make your
soul grow. Whether you’re a “creator” or a “consumer,” you are a cog in
a machine, catering to interests that you barely understand—that
anyone barely understands. Feeding the machine, with your work, your
time, your attention, and yes, even your soul.

Creating for “the algorithm” instead of creating for the sake of
creation itself is hardly creation at all. It is a soul-shrinking
activity, as is consumption for consumption’s sake. We’ve built a world
that glorifies consumption, and are now living in a world that is
hyper-optimized towards one singular metric: the consumption of
information. Whether this information is properly ingested, digested,
and transformed into a body of knowledge doesn’t matter. And why stop at
knowledge? Why can’t we build a world that produces, grows, encourages,
incubates, or otherwise brings about lovers of wisdom?

Filtering can be useful, no doubt about it. There is hardly any
difference between censorship (no information) and overload (all the
information, all the time). We’re drowning in information, but starving
for wisdom.

Algorithms won’t help us with that. We need art, and music, and singing,
as Vonnegut wrote so beautifully. Express what’s inside of us, to
experience becoming, to make our souls grow.

The world is splitting in two, or at least my world, which is the
internet. It might be hard to resist the pull of the soul-sucking
machinery some days. But when it comes to building a home for my work
(and my soul), the choice of which side to inhabit is an easy one: the
one that is unfiltered.

This article first appeared on dergigi.com.