Machinery

June 28, 2022

In my last post, I sang a little praise for our community and for social media in general. And it's true that my experience so far has been much more positive than I would have thought. But I'm also a complete novice in this field and there's a lot I just don't understand. Algorithms, for example.

It was from Ava that I first learned that there was such a thing. I drew you a picture of how I imagine such an algorithm. We drop in our post at the top, then it goes through a thousand conveyor belts and cogs, through locks and turbines, is scanned and screened, chopped up and put back together again, and at the end it is decided in a completely inscrutable way which of you will get the whole thing spat out again and which of you won't. It seems almost Kafkaesque to me. We are exposed to a machinery that was set in motion by humans at some point, but has taken on a life of its own that no living being can fully comprehend.

In any case, the result seems to be not everyone who follows us here on Instagram gets to see our posts. That's a shame, of course. But Ava wouldn't be Ava if she didn't already have a solution. And that brings us to our second homework, which I can also cross off the to-do list now:

So far, we are on Facebook and Instagram. But for everyone who like us so much that they don't want to miss anything, we now have our own newsletter on Substack. If you want, you can subscribe and you will receive all our posts as email. But you can also read it online. Everything is sorted out there, a bit like a blog. You can find the link in our bio, under the profile picture. I am curious what you say about it!