Discombobulation and Ghost

If you allow opaque algorithms to shape your view rather than supporting open source projects (like Ghost), you are virtually guaranteed future discombobulation.

Personally, I hate that feeling. To feel discombobulated is to feel unmoored, to question, to doubt, to distrust memory. It's like reality is warping. It combines surprise, disappointment, uncertainty, and being lost. It's the opposite of feeling secure, and makes it difficult to be relaxed and open enough to focus on higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy, like pursuing a goal.

I remember how gleeful I felt more than 20 years ago when I figured out how to use Amazon's "books people also bought" links to recursively explore a new genre. Once I found an author I liked (and what magic it was not to be limited by what was in the bookstore!), I could go and look at what other people liked, then keep circling around until I had mapped out the set. There weren't sponsored links, and it wasn’t necessarily defined by genre. New authors would get added as commonalities of audience were found, but it was stable enough to explore and interact with and develop a sense for how it all worked. If I wanted to find something again, I could be reasonably certain I could work my way back. In other words, there was object permanence.

Before they turn 1, babies develop a sense of object permanence: something exists even if they can't see it. That sense of surprise and growing delight is why playing peekaboo will elicit smiles and giggles every time you come out from hiding. As we grow, we start to take our sense of object permanence for granted. Adults will probably not react with surprise and delight if you try to do peekaboo with them in the grocery store line. But if I can't find something again when I know I saw it, it shakes my sense of place, of permanence. It’s discombobulating!

For many of us, our reality is deeply intertwined with what we see online. What we see online is less permanent than streets or trees or people. If opaque algorithms are intervening to show me new links and hide ones that used to populate my recommendations, it's harder to map out my reality. This happens within a few clicks, sometimes. When we succumb to clickbait, and companies measure engagement and the worth of an article by clicks, there are extra incentives to produce more of that. The articles that you might read once and have stick with you are deemed less valuable. Content costs money to keep available, and websites are in flux. For example, a Pew Research Report, "When Online Content Disappears" found that more than a third of websites from 2013 had disappeared by October 2023. (https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/#links-on-news-websites, downloaded May 23, 2024) No wonder I might start to feel discombobulated.

This discombobulation also makes it hard to lay down memories and learn from the past. It's why I think my sense of when things happened over the past few years is so tentative. It's hard to consolidate my understanding and empathy for the person I was at different points when I can't reconstruct what I knew when. This is a real risk if I want to learn lessons from the experience, because hindsight is 20/20. Unless I can remember the doubt and what I knew at the time, I'm very likely to draw the wrong conclusions. The unmooring makes it harder for me to grow.

As an aside, I also suspect that constant discombobulation is related to the general rise in anxiety in the U.S. as we've become more online. (See for example Goodwin RD, Weinberger AH, Kim JH, Wu M, Galea S. Trends in anxiety among adults in the United States, 2008-2018: Rapid increases among young adults. J Psychiatr Res. 2020 Nov;130:441-446. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2020.08.014. Epub 2020 Aug 21. PMID: 32905958; PMCID: PMC7441973. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7441973/ Downloaded May 23, 2024.) But that's a subject for a different time.

The ability to combat discombobulation is why I think supporting open source where possible, like using Ghost, is so important. It is possible to go in and understand the software and it's impacts. I can map reality. Am I likely to do this myself? Probably not. Is it going to be perfect? No. But the open source terms of service allows exploration if someone sees odd results. I am an active participant in the ecosystem, I have agency. By using platforms with proprietary methods, I'm left with the choice of take it or leave it. Once you're in, it becomes hard to leave because a network-based service is more valuable the more connections that are possible. But for-profit terms of service generally allow for unilateral changes by them, require consent to tracking, and forbid any personalization of the terms. It's very one-sided. There are too many reports of abuses for me to feel easy about this. So in their take it or leave it choice, I'm trying to leave it to choose Ghost.