Recommendations from the algorithm following a mass shooting

Would you like an NRA shirt or a rage bait article to go with your reading of the news about another act of American violence?

Chuck Haga, who has been a journalist for longer than I have been alive, posted simply, “Guns.” I didn’t see the post until late last night so I googled “shooting” and the top auto-populated completion to my query was “shooting ranges near me.” So I skipped that and just went for what I was looking for which I presumed based on Chuck’s post was some sort of shooting. There were too many to choose from so I had to reverse engineer which one he was talking about by looking at the timestamps of the stories I read. Eventually I concluded that Chuck was talking about the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs championship parade, and not the four people shot at an Atlanta high school, or a man killed in an apartment parking lot in Ashburn, VA or the school shooting plot in southern California that was foiled by law enforcement, or a long feature story about why a security officer in Parkland, FL didn’t try to stop a mass shooting there several years ago, or any of the others that showed up in my midnight search 

Then I went to sleep. I woke up this morning and saw the video I’d avoided watching the night before that showed a couple of guys tackling the shooter in Kansas City. While they struggled on the ground, people walked and ran by, some in panic, some casually. A couple of other guys took what look like selfies amid the chaos. As the two heroes subdued the shooter a woman nearby frantically called to others to help but most of them just kept walking or running by. Then the police showed up and helped out the two men who bravely stopped the shooter from running away or hurting more people.

I scrolled a little further and saw a post from a satirical website about how a Black woman who sang the Black national anthem at the Super Bowl was booed, which is something that did not happen at all. The post is one of the top results if you search “Black national anthem” on Facebook and there are 21,000 comments on it — which, again, was about a thing that never even happened, because the woman was never booed when she sang. I scrolled a little past the fake story and was presented with an ad for a company that makes a shirt with the slogan “NRA AF.” I assume this was because I Googled “shooting” or perhaps because I had clicked on a post meant to rile up right-wingers who are pissed that Black people sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” before the “Star Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl, which they are very much pissed about even though they’re being lied to that it was Beyonce who did the singing.

All of this information intake probably took a total of seven minutes between last night and this morning, which just shows you how quickly you can fill your head with garbage. If you are not careful, or if you do not have at least passable reading comprehension skills, or, like many Americans, have abhorrent media literacy, it doesn’t take long for this type of information intake to make you start believing things that are simply not true. It’s a collective calamity of the mind that threatens our very existence but we all just accept as part of modern life that people’s brains are being dumbed down and destroyed every single day by the algorithms that feed us. I have no answer for it, I’m just reporting the facts of what I see and one of those facts is that the algorithms that rule our lives are probably destroying most of our brains. A Buddhist monk I read about a while back said the “ultimate authority is moving from the human to the algorithm” and I thought, wow, that’s profound. Then I read further in the story that the monk was consulting with Big Tech people working on artificial intelligence, maybe trying to convince them to be moral about it or something, and wondered if the monk hadn’t sold out, too. Either way, the monk thinks the world is ending and technology is playing a big part in it.

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