Don't let machines or the crowd decide your world

You will always be boring if you can't make your own choices

Jazzy Sport vinyl shop in Kyoto, via ASIP blog

“All you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be.” —Pink Floyd

When was the last time you went into a physical vinyl shop and browsed old tracks you’ve never heard, perhaps those released before you were even born? Or visited an online music shop (not streamer) like Beatport and sorted tunes by release date instead of trending? How about walked into a grocery store, uninfluenced, to make a meal without a preset ingredient list or recipe in mind, simply choosing the freshest produce that day? What about the last time you went to a bookstore and picked something that looks interesting purely via the cover, in a category you don’t normally read, without checking the number of reviews it had online?

If you don’t do any of this (or things like it) regularly, I think you’re missing out on not just some of the basic joys in life, you’re living in a world where decisions are fully governed by machines and the crowd (frequently the same thing). And could you ever make any interesting, truly independent choices, if you’ve lost the muscle to decide or explore creatively without technical or crowd-consensus assistance?

It goes further than this of course. It depends how much you care about anything, and how motivated you are to be inventive. If we’re talking music, once you go beyond independent curation and discovery, you might wish to compose and do sound design yourself (via software and synths, building a home music studio). For cooking you might decide to source ingredients from a local farmer’s market instead of a grocery store, or even grow your own produce in a greenhouse. For literature, you might personally contribute to the corpus of work in a genre. However far you go is emblematic of how serious you are about something. But for today’s post, let’s keep this to the even more simplistic question of choice (I think people who create already choose consciously, and you won’t even be all that great with tools like AI unless you can also build things yourself).

We’ve never had more freedom, more choices. But in reality, most people are subtly funneled into the same streams, the same pools of ‘socially approved’ culture, cuisine and ideas. Remixes and memes abound, but almost no one shares anything weird, original or different. People wake up, perhaps with ambitions to make unique choices they believe are their own, only to find that the options have been filtered, curated, and ‘tailored to existing tastes’ by algorithms that claim to know them best. This only happens as these algorithms prioritize popularity or even just safe choices over individuality. They don’t lead you down our own path or really care what’s interesting and unknown, they lead us down paths proven profitable, efficient, safe. If you work in a creative sector (and many of us do) you already know how dangerous this is professionally, not to mention spiritually.

Algorithms might make for comfortable consumers, but they cannot produce thoughtful creators, and they are slowly taking your ability to choose from you. You might think you’re choosing, but you never really are. When your ideas, interests, and even daily meals are largely inspired by whatever was already approved, already done, already voted on and liked, you’re only experiencing life as an echo of the masses (or the machines, if personalized based on historic preference). And in this echo chamber, genuine discovery is rare, even radical.

Of course, it’s very easy to live like this, as we live in a society totally biased to pain avoidance and ease (it’s so ingrained much of the medical establishment only treats symptoms, not causes). There’s a an unconscious allure in this conformity, a feeling of belonging, of social safety, it’s a warm blanket you aren’t alone in the cosmos. But at what cost? In blending into the mainstream wasteland, you risk losing something deeply human: your impulse to explore, the courage to confront the unfamiliar, the potential to define yourself on your own terms. You don’t get real creativity without courage, and no one has this until they stop looking to the crowd for consensus approval.

So here’s a call to action: find ways to break this trance. Stop caring about if others already viewed something to determine if it’s for you. Step away from what’s trending, not just to be contrarian, but to reconnect with the human act of discovery in a way that’s unbiased by product signals, or even just (different from) what you’ve always done. Go to a physical music shop and try out an entirely new genre of music and see how it sits with you, likes not required. When using digital platforms, sort ideas as simple and unbiased as possible such as by date or genre without application of popularity filters. An easy way to think about this is many are constantly eating a form of cultural Big Mac every day, while Michelin-quality food is just a click away, but essentially invisible because it requires a tiny amount more work. They don’t even know they’re doing this, how this affects their mind, or what they’re missing.

If you can begin to reclaim moments of curiosity and choice, I’m certain you’ll find yourself becoming more fully and uniquely you. And in those tiny rebellions, you’ll remember the thrill of what it means to exercise real autonomy. This is pretty much how I curate music, and I personally find the results far more fulfilling than ingesting the ‘now that’s what I call music’ style slop presented by streaming platforms. This small act is one of many that creates a deep well of personal meaning and inspiration for me. I can’t imagine living without it. And it’s just one area that’s the case: there’s a huge world out there when you decide to have interests that are your own, where you’re actively choosing what to engage with not just to get a fake feeling of connection.

As you go about your life, ask yourself: are you really making your own choices? How sure are you? It will require some very conscious steps to do this in modernity, and definitely more so in the future. The alternative route is to continue to let the machines/crowd program you. The machine goals are aligned with a company, the crowd is aligned with banality. Your path is whatever you want it to be (of course, many are terrified by such prospects of freedom). Which way, western man?