Kill Your Local Algorithm

by Josie - 04/23/2026

I am fearful, as are many around me. My tools are using me and I am not using them. Even as the world crumbles around me, the imperial boomerang continues its steady course, and our loving leaders baptize genocide, I’m not doing what I want to do. The world melts but the only thing cherished is the golden calf, the Market herself. We find new frontiers of economic debauchery. And I’m still on my phone.

My life has improved tenfold in the last year. I came out to my family and community, finally breaking out of the catacombic closet of shame. I started HRT, I started presenting in a way more to my liking. I was finally distanced from the “community” which fostered me my entire life and pushed me out with barely a thought as soon as I “threatened” transition. I found new friends, a new community, and a new home. This city is perhaps the best thing to ever happen to me.

And yet there is something in me that is frantic. I can’t feel my heart beating but it tears from my chest. I fear that I will leave this world the same way that I found it, with no imprint even in my time. I fear that for all my thought of art, all my love of creation, I will have created nothing. I need to vomit the new out, for fear of it never leaving my throat, for fear of it dying in childbirth. Stillborn, untouched, unheard, unknown.

And here I am. On my phone.

There have been some days in these last weeks where it felt like the world might very well end and yet I couldn’t help but be drawn to the same place I am always drawn – my same small, blue light screen. Or perhaps my larger, horizontal one.

My tools are using me and I know they’re using me and it creates in me a fear of ever even trying to use them to begin with. There are so many pursuits I wish to undertake that will have to be done on a screen, will have to be done with the incredibly useful and genuinely revelatory technology that has been made available to us through the internet and through computers. For all the AI bootlickers say about their pet project, the “democratization” of art already happened some 30 years ago.

I want to build a website, I want to learn HTML, I want to compose a song and type a script and film an animation. But I know that the moment I step forward, I will not be on my home turf. The immaterial has me beaten.

I can feel my tools eating away at me and it makes me feel pathetic. They’ve been working their magic on me so long. So many late nights in high school, screen illuminating a dark room, homework waiting. Simple work left undone. I’m nostalgic for those times now. But these were miserable moments. They seeped into college too; the pandemic took a part of my life that could have spring boarded me forward, into the real world, and instead placed me uniformly in the box with the screen.

Every night I get home from my job, and after a day spent mostly online, I log back in. Not always. I am fighting. I am trying to do better. Somehow though, my screen time keeps ticking up and up and up.

How, in a day where I don’t have time to create my zines and don’t have time to do the dishes and don’t have time to read my comics or my scriptures or my novels, did I somehow accumulate 2 hours on Instagram? It could be worse, of course. It could be 4. I could be in the place I once was, late to work and late to bed and making nothing. It’s embarrassing. I know that much of this is a problem of will. I’ve clawed back a lot. But it’s still too much.

It’s a barb in my side that the ever-seeing eye of the algorithm has periodically connected me to some genuinely wonderful things. Last year, an Instagram ad led me to a performance of a musical that I’d never imagined I’d be privileged to see live. Several years earlier, Spotify recommendations sowed the seeds for the vibrant web of my modern musical interests. Even in the last months, social media algorithms have directed me to events in the city that have brought me great joy. The barb is that sometimes, the system really works. But that’s how they get you.

The diamonds in the rough are not worth what tech companies are taking. They’re taking my agency, they’re taking my attention span, and they are building an advertising profile that knows more about my proclivities than I consciously do. God forbid it is ever used for anything more than advertising. And they didn’t force this upon me. Not really. Perhaps being present online is not a choice in our digital age. But the shape of that presence still is.

I need to kill my local algorithm. I want to build relationships and artistic appreciation, not just vague knowledge of things. Algorithms incentivize shallow engagement with works of art - single panels from comics, short clips from films, and excerpts from books are not the works themselves, they are but dim shadows. But so many people walk away from these phantoms with cemented opinions, both positive and negative. I am deeply guilty of this. How many tiny and meaningless snippets of great art have I touched without really understanding them? In an hour of my precious time, how much more enrichment might I have gained from full attention to one piece rather than splintered focus on two hundred?

For as long as this climate continues, it seems to me the only way out is to completely replace algorithmic recommendations with those based in personal connections that are intentionally pursued and explored. This means listening to playlists made by friends, seeking out my favorite artist’s favorite artists, watching the movie a film I love paid homage to, and checking out the bands my local venue is hosting. It means getting my art from somewhere real and not from a bottomless pit with no internal motivation but to keep me in its maw.

And to receive, I must also be willing to give (and to ask!) I want to be someone who is always sharing art with the friends it reminded me of, someone who shares what I love with my circles, not for personal branding purposes but because I want more people to appreciate it. I want the boldness to ask the comic store employee what they’ve been reading and what they recommend. I want the tenacity to actually do research rather than expecting everything to be handed to me by the machine.

Music is one artistic realm where I find the value of this venture to be abundantly clear. So many of the songs I love conjure involuntary memories of the people who shared them with me or the circumstances under which I came upon them. Those connections bring the art warmth. I will always treasure the songs my wife sent me when we claimed we were “Just Friends” (by Audrey Mika). When I listen to C418’s album “One” for the thousandth time, I’m reminded of the long Discord calls where I first heard it played in the background. And whenever “Strange Astrology” by Slothrust plays from my mix, I think fondly of the former coworker who first shared it with me.

I know this isn’t some great revelation; everything I’ve said here has been in earnest but it certainly hasn’t been original. Much of what I’ve written has been articulated before by deeper thinkers than me. But these disjointed thoughts are on my mind and I must release them.