Are you in danger of losing yourself to someone else's algorithms?

Kevin Roose is a technology writer for the New York Times, and I'm reading his book Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. He writes about something he calls "machine drift," where we increasingly default to the choices our apps make for us.

I did not expect to read about personal frameworks in this book, but he is advocating creating just that, as a necessary counterweight to those easy choices that Google and Alexa and Amazon and Siri are increasingly making for us.

Roose recommends creating what I'm calling a personal framework -- which is based on writing down what is important to you, and referring to it regularly. Roose calls it an "inventory” (Roose 2021, pp 94-95, Kindle edition):

As a first step to resisting machine drift, I recommend taking an inventory of your own preferences. Keep track of all of the choices you make in a day and try to determine which of those choices are truly yours, and which are fundamentally shaped by a machine’s instructions or suggestions. Do you buy the same brand of dog food every month because it’s what Amazon recommended to you, or because your dog actually likes it? Does the route you take to work reflect your idea of a good commute, or Google Maps’ idea of the optimally efficient journey? Would you take that hike, wear that jacket, or loudly state that political position if there were no likes, views, or retweets hanging in the balance—if it was only about you, who you are, and what would bring you the most pleasure and fulfillment? Once you’ve teased apart your own preferences, values, and priorities, write them down. What hobbies and activities do you actually like doing? What political and spiritual beliefs would you still have in a vacuum, even if nobody would ever know you believed them? Which relationships actually enrich your life? Keep that list handy. Put it up on the wall, if you want. This is, to a first approximation, a blueprint of your core self—and it will remain a useful reference point.

(Note: bolding is mine.)

It is frighteningly easy -- and it is meant to be easy ("frictionless") to default our own thinking to the machines around us. Earlier in this chapter, Roose calls it a form of surrender.

However, losing oneself to powerful influences is an ancient problem. Today we have machine drift. But ancient narratives also warned about your identity and priorities being erased by others' desires to make use of you.

Machine drift is a new formulation of this ongoing, existential human dilemma: how do you hang on to your sense of who you are, and your sense of what matters most to you, when so many external forces would like you to forget it and just do it their way?

In the Odyssey, Odysseus is constantly in danger of losing his perspective; losing his sense of who he is and of what matters to him: which is summed up in the idea of going home. Sometimes he faces physical dangers, but quite often he faces psychological dangers which are all about him forgetting who he is, and what he is about. The Land of the Lotus Eaters is frictionless. Circe’s charm nearly prevents Odysseus from returning home, until his men remind him. Perhaps our phones are our Circes.

The Hebrew Bible also echoes this deep theme of going home; and, just like in the Odyssey, the way home is to hold on to the memory of who you are, where you came from, and what your true priorities are. These ancient stories, written down, memorized, and repeated, are quite literally what kept a small group of people from being absorbed into conquering empires, such as the Babylonians and the Romans.

Odysseus and the great prophets of Judaism kept their identities by reminding themselves, and others around them, who they were; what they cared about, and what was important to them: what their distinct personal and communal priorities centered around, and why.

We are not fighting off the Cyclops or ancient Babylon, but we are most certainly in danger of slipping into a kind of oblivion. The battle is a battle against forces that want you to forget your own priorities.

You come home to your own self, your own voice, your own human life, by mapping out what "home" is. You write down what is important to you; what you personally care about, and review it regularly.

You do this in part because there are powerful economic and cultural forces out there, actively working to make you forget.

References

Roose, Kevin. Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. Random House, 2021.