We love dancing with our algorithms.

Instagram was life. My 12 year-old self once lived life for the gram. Now after decades of growth, The New York Times reports how social media apps are struggling to keep up. The crash of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram leaves us with a loud boom: is the age of social media ending?

Collectively, we’re fed up with feeling moody and obsessed. Our days start with doom scrolling down digital rabbit holes only to look up and realize it’s no longer daylight. We can’t escape the entangled influence of social media’s recommendation algorithms on our values, beliefs, and attitudes.

In a time of digital feeds and “For You” content, an introduction with my name and city does little to bridge strangers to friends. Each of us in our own digital moodscapes wondering if we scrolled upon the same virtual lands. Let’s skip the ice breakers and flash each other our targeted ads.

What have we risked and gained by dancing with the recommendation algorithms?

Where are we?

Make Instagram, Instagram again!

Facebook and Instagram 1.0 had the intention to bring us closer to what we love. The emphasis was to maintain our existing interests and friendships. In June 2022, the movement “make Instagram, Instagram again,” famously backed by Kylie Jenner, chased the simpler days of picture posts shared in chronological order.

The decrescendo of agency, ethics, and choice leaves us bombarded by monetized content and the creator economy. Both of which are driven by mysterious data streams.

The emergence of alternative apps like Headspace, Gas, and BeReal attempt to satisfy our unfulfilled desires to be in control and to be real.

Digital serendipity is addicting

We embrace the gamble.

Nothing is stopping us from deleting our accounts, but many of us stay on the platforms — quietly active. We embrace the gamble of digital serendipity where we “randomly” discover new and exciting content.

Katja Rausch, author of Serendipity or Algorithm, defines serendipity as having no goal while “algorithms are based on a computational process assigned to a goal.” Algorithms exist in a logical and arranged world that attempts to emulate the intense and irrational quality of serendipity.

Every time we tap “refresh” we ask the platform to feed us something. From Tiktok to Amazon search engines, we’re flashed content precisely generated by algorithms. It’s addicting to tap “refresh” and revel in the freaky accuracy or surprising delight of recommended content.

Increased visibility

We explore expansively while trapped in rare niches that make us feel seen. There’s comfort in this. I find my own expectations shifting in the real world when I know digital spaces exist that nearly perfectly reflect my interests. Who cares if people in my close physical proximity don’t like my thrifted sweater vest or clog aesthetic. I have #thriftedvests and @thecloglife to back me up.

All anyone wants is to feel seen and be heard. We get funneled into digital multiverses where we can find representation and discover new communities.

Every TikTok “core” aesthetic creates subcultures where greater visibility online creates acceptance. It feels like the glow-ups are happening at an accelerated pace. Conversely, an uptick in fake news, radical ideologies, and conspiracy theories have thrived because of online happenstance.

No longer are we limited to our family or location to piece together our values, beliefs, and attitudes. My own aesthetic is a collage of scattered screenshots and saved posts of brands, influencers, and quotes mostly brought to my attention by chance or rather by digital serendipity.

Serendipity vs. Algorithm

Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms (2011–2012) Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty.

The illusion of delight

The illusion of serendipity that algorithms create is similar to the deceived delight in Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms (2011–2012). The Instagram selfie popularized the art installation. The room interior is covered with mirrors along the walls and small round LED lights hang from the ceilings. The effect is an endlessness of space. Viewers often describe standing in the room as the closest they will get to the multiverse of some sort.

In 2016, I waited two hours at the Seattle Art Museum to step into one of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. When it was my turn I felt pressured by the 45 second time limit. I stood in silence, rotating my body and staring at the multitudes of my own reflection.

The spirit and magic of the seemingly infinite space was a singular experience. The phantom didn’t follow me out of the room. Its impermanence left me hungry for a reality that pointed back to me.

No shocker. We’re in a mental health crisis.

Kusama creates a new reality with her installations. Similarly, Rausch characterizes algorithms as reality makers creating a calculated false reality that sometimes becomes our new reality. She explains, “By excessive personalization algorithms lock us in narcissistic universes, formatted by our own knowledge and desires.”

What reality are you living in?

The moment we look up from our devices we get hit with the permanence of our surroundings. We step from one digital universe to another. What we’re left with is a dire mental health crisis for U.S. teens and adults. A panel of medical experts recommends children as young of 8 and all adults under 65 be screened for anxiety disorders.

This fall, a 57-student boarding school did the extreme: no smartphones for all students and faculty. Instead, students received minimalist Light Phones for essential communication. The Wall Street Journal reports how within two months of adopting this new policy students felt… relief. There was less pressure to engage with the drama of group texts and bombardment of social media notifications.

When we leave out digital bubbles our viral posts, verified check marks, discover pages, and follower lists are left for us alone to obsess over.

We are the curators of absurd algorithms

By dancing with the algorithms, we gain visibility to new ideas and voices that shape who we are. We start living off the algorithms to tell us what is in sight or should be out of mind. As designers, this becomes dangerous when our digital moodscapes limit our ability to imagine expansively.

I find myself at risk of embracing the nihilistic mindset of Evelyn Quan Wang from the whimsical sci-fi action movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. The movie feels refreshing in its absurdist stylistic approach. The random hot dogs for fingers, multiverse everything bagel, and talking googly eyed rocks don’t feel far off from what we might come across online. It uses childlike imagination to decipher universal adult feelings. The power is in how absurdity is curated and pieced together to create new meaning.

With everything everywhere all at once, where do we look first?

With just a few clicks (or taps), we can float into new digital multiverses. The digital serendipity tricks us into believing there’s something perfect out there for us to discover, but what if we embraced the absurdity of it all?

From the hype around generative A.I to aggressive social media feeds, online content will become increasingly bizarre. This redirects the pressure to ourselves to determine how it relates to our own lives after we look up from our screens.

When you disengage from the algorithm the less accurate it will become. In that moment, you notice the control you had all along. It’s up to us to peel back the layers of upfront irrelevancy. There might be something in there that can stretch and provoke us enough to leave any false realities we’re boxed into.

You are what you… scroll upon

You are what you eat. You are what your recommendation algorithm feeds you. When there is no feed to refresh we’re left on our own to discover something new. It calls for the comeback of serendipity with no strings attached.