I fell victim to the algorithmic rabbit hole.

I know better. I can usually recognize these things from at least arms length. But oh, Threads, you got me once again.

Here I was trying to build a respectable base of followers and—

Well, you know how it goes for us creative types? There’s often no point in making, posting, writing, any of it if no one is reading—and because our once-supportive search giants now seem to only send a fraction of a fraction of historical outbound traffic to struggling start up sites, there is often but a single alternative: self promotion on social media.

So there I was: I was trying to build an audience.

We all think we’re smarter than the algorithm—we’d like to think that, at least—but the algorithm is relentless. It never sleeps. It learns from subtle cues and pries meaning out of unintended tells.  My humanity betrayed me and my scroll must have lingered a little too long on fired up commentary, an attention-grabbing video, a meme with a political vibe… something, somehow, some way I must have given myself up.

Here I thought I was using the algorithm, but no, the algorithm had me sussed—and inside of a few weeks my feed had transformed from a creative utopia of artists sharing work and ideas into something gross: the typical political silo of rage-bait and anger. My heart beats a little fast just thinking about opening that app now.

I wasn’t shaping the feed. The feed had tried to reshape me.

It is so easy to slip down that dark burrow and realize that the sunlight outside has vanished behind you. I doubt I’m free forever, but maybe I’ll let the machines cool their chase a while before I go back.