“Streaming services often Allows account holders to create multiple separate profiles, which I appreciate. I hope the advice I get reflects my taste, not my partner’s. Is this selfish? Is there any benefit to sharing personal data with others? “
——Xizhongdao
Dear Isle,
At least as it is commonly understood, sharing is only beneficial when resources are limited. A child sharing lunch with a classmate who didn’t have lunch, or a rich man donating money to a less fortunate person is generous. But I have a hard time believing that confiscating personal data would be laudable when enough people could go. What troubles you is not the fear of selfishness, but the realization that you see other people’s inclinations and preferences as a form of pollution, a threat to the purity of your personal algorithm. Sticking to your own digital realm means you believe your taste is so unique and precise that any disruption to its schema compromises its underlying integrity.
At a basic level, a prediction engine is like karma, an invisible mechanism that records your every action and returns you something of equal value. If you watch a lot of true crime documentation, you’ll end up in a directory dominated by creepy titles. If you tend to stream early-2000s sitcoms, your recommendation will turn into a buffet of nostalgic millennials. The notion that you reap what you sow, that every action elicits an equal response, is not just a spiritual treasure, but a law encoded in the infrastructure of our digital world. Few users really understand how these forecasting techniques work. (On TikTok, speculation about how algorithms can function is as dense as an academic debate about the metaphysical makeup of angels.) Still, we like to believe that there are certain cosmic principles at work and that our every action is faithfully For the record, we are shaping our future entertainment every moment through what we choose to stay, engage in and buy.
Maybe it’s worth exploring this sense of control a bit.You indicate that you want your suggestion to be to your taste, but what Yes The taste, exactly, where does it come from? A person’s preferences are often thought of as self-contained, but our inclinations are influenced by a variety of external factors, including where we live, how we grew up, our age, and other relevant data. These variables are identifiable trends that apply to the entire population. Demographic analysis demonstrates how easy it is to spot patterns in large samples. Given a sufficiently large dataset, political opinions can be predicted based on fashion preferences (LL Bean buyers tend to be conservative; Kenzo attracts liberals), and personality traits can be inferred from what music users prefer (Nicki Minaj fans tend to be extroverted). No one knows what caused these correlations, but their consistency suggests that none of us are masters of our own destiny, nor creators of custom characters. Our behavior falls into predictable patterns that are subject to social forces beyond the level of our consciousness.
And, if this were not the case, the prediction engine would not work. It’s nice to think that testimonials on your private profile are as unique as your fingerprints. But these recommendations are drawn from the behavioral data of millions of other users, and the more successful the platform is at guessing what you’ll be watching, the more likely your behavior will be in line with everyone else’s. The term “user similarity” describes how automated recommendations can analogize the behavior of customers with similar habits, meaning, essentially, you have thousands of shadow selves who are streaming, viewing, and buying many of the same as you The product is like quantum entangled particles mirroring each other from opposite sides of the universe. Their choices inform you about the options shown, just as your choices influence what content is promoted for future users.
In popular culture at least, karma is often seen as a simple form of cosmic retribution, but is more properly understood as the principle of interdependence. Everything in the world is connected to everything else, forming a vast web of interrelationships in which the consequences of every action reverberate throughout the system. For those of us steeped in the duality of Western philosophy and American individualism, it can be difficult to understand how our lives are intertwined with those of others. In fact, it is only recently that information technologies — and the large datasets they create — have revealed to us what some of the oldest spiritual traditions have been teaching for millennia: that we live in a chaotic and interdependent world. , the distance between any two people (or the space between any two vectors) is usually smaller than we think.
With that in mind, Island’s sharing of personal data may be less an act of generosity than an acknowledgment of this interdependence. The people you live with have changed you in countless ways, subtly changing what you believe, what you buy, the way you speak. If your current taste in movies is different from theirs, that doesn’t mean it always will be. In fact, the longer you share a home, the closer your preferences will almost certainly be. This is arguably a good thing. Most of us have been through a self-perpetuating karmic cycle hell at some point, the way one cigarette leads to addiction or one lie triggers a chain of further deceptions. Auto-recommendations can also foster narrowly recursive habits, breeding more and more of the same, until we get caught up in a one-dimensional reflection of past choices. Deliberately opening your profile to others can be a way to let some air into a murky cave of personal preference, a place where the past constantly reverberates, isolating you from the vast world of possibilities outside.
