Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter, A Series of Doubts. I will tell you why I chose that title some other time. Today, I want to tell you why I am launching a newsletter.

There are a few personal reasons: I want to prioritize long- or medium-form writing, as opposed to short, reactive outbursts on social media; I want to slow down, give my ideas time to develop and evolve, keep a regular schedule, build an audience over time; and I want to use this platform as an output of my experiments with digital gardening (more on that in the future).

But above all, I see this as a crucial part of the broader political project of escaping, resisting and ultimately even destroying The Algorithm. And I believe this is necessary for the survival of our species.

How did we get here?

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was possible to find an audience online by writing semi-regularly (and half-intelligently) about virtually any topic imaginable. This was called “blogging.”

The simple technology that made blogging so powerful was the RSS feed, which gave us the ability to aggregate content (from multiple sources) in reverse chronological order. This technology still exists today and is used to distribute podcasts (for example).

Early social media sites used similar feeds to distribute content within their walled gardens, but over time those feeds were replaced with algorithms. With algorithmic feeds, instead of seeing all the posts from people you follow in reverse order, complex equations determine which content you see and in what order. The exact factors that influence your feed are unknown, but they might include things like “engagement” (likes, comments, and other ways people interact with the post), the type of content you’ve interacted with in the past, and countless other data we can’t even begin to fathom.

At first this all seemed like a fun little game - chasing likes for endorphins, reacting with enthusiasm or (more often) outrage to whatever showed up in our feeds, going down rabbit holes. We knew, deep down, that something was off, that our attention was being captured, our data harvested, our time stolen, our agency undermined, our behaviour manipulated. But few of us understood how serious it was.

Now we live in a world where we carry devices connected to supercomputers designed to capture our attention, and several times a day we point them at our faces and submit to The Algorithm.

I’m not just talking about social media, though that is the most egregious and obvious example. The Algorithm also exists on content streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify. It’s on the websites where we consume our news. It’s on the ecommerce platforms where we shop. It’s in Google search results.

What are the features of The Algorithm?

First, there’s an infinite scroll. You can never reach the end of the feed. It’s impossible to get a full view of all the content available, like an alphabetical index or a chronological listing. Content is “recommended” to you in a personalized way, but not by a human, and it’s never clear how the recommendations are chosen. You have limited control over how information is presented to you, often with no real options for sorting, filtering, etc. The line between organic and sponsored content might be blurry. In all cases, there are various ways for the machines to collect data from you, usually in the form of “engagement” features such as like buttons, comments, sharing, following, but also in ways that are less obvious, like how much time you spend looking at something before moving on to the next bit of content or how many times you come back to it. All of this happens in a black box, out of your control and in ways that can’t be fully understood.

How do we resist?

There is an almost universally accepted narrative, conveniently pushed by tech companies, that once a technology has been unleashed upon society, we can never go back. We have no choice but to accept it and live with it. In the final episode of Data Vampires - Paris Marx’s brilliant mini-series at Tech Won’t Save Us - data ethicist and researcher Ali Alkhatib argues that destroying harmful technology is an option worth considering:

Sometimes a person will encounter an algorithmic system and it is not going to stop hurting them, and they will not be able to escape the system. And given those two facts, I think it’s pretty obvious that it is reasonable to start dismantling the system, to destroy it. (...) It doesn’t seem radical to me to say, if you can’t leave a system, if the system is harming you, if you can’t get it to stop hurting you, there really aren’t that many other options.

Am I going to destroy the system with this newsletter? Maybe not. But in recent years this antiquated technology (email) has emerged as a surprisingly subversive way of distributing content (mostly) non-algorithmically.

For now at least, email hasn’t been subjected to the kind of algorithmic sabotage that our various newsfeeds have. When I send you an email, I can be reasonably certain that it will reach its intended destination. There’s always a chance it might get caught in some spam filter, and increasingly there are AI tools to “help” you “focus” on the “important” emails in your inbox. (I would encourage you to reject such tools if possible.) But for the most part, your inbox is like an old-school RSS feed: a reverse chronological list of content that you can choose to read or ignore however you want.

This is a precious and powerful thing. There are other avenues that allow us to connect with people and access “content” (I dislike that word) mostly without algorithmic interference, including podcasts, Discord servers, group chats, even some content streaming platforms. All of these are dependent on technology owned by corporations that don’t have our best interests at heart, so they are precarious, at risk of experiencing platform decay. But they are tools we can use now.

I don’t have perfect solutions to offer. But I think it’s important for us to resist where we can, to cultivate diverse ways of connecting with people and sharing ideas.

It’s worth a shot. I hope you will join me on this journey.

I hesitate to make grand promises about this newsletter, but I am hoping it will go out once a week and cover topics like tech, culture, politics, ideas and mental health.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe.

And if you like what I have to say, tell a friend.

See you next week.