Endless Opportunities

This is an essay about a project, and about algorithms.

Algorithms shape the content we see. They filter the air we breathe online. We help design their output with our input, but the formulas are known to a few, and they change on schedules nobody announces.

Before I learned any geography I wondered why the Appalachians are smooth and the Rockies are not. Approach the question as a child and any answer seems plausible — maybe they were made at the same time and one just happens to be softer. The answer is millions of years of rain. You cannot watch it happen. You stare at the mountain waiting for the tree line to shift.

The image results are the mountain. Search the same words every day and look for the first thing that changes: a new picture, an outlier, one that quietly leaves. This book keeps fifty days of the first fifty Google image results for “endless opportunities”, so the changes have somewhere to be seen. What moves is both the content of the web and the judgement of the algorithm. Neither is neutral.

To most people none of this is visible. The mountain is on the horizon and in the background of every photograph, and nobody notices it move. Where is the image you liked last year? Last month? Here is a more useful and relevant one. Isn’t that better.