In a recent rage clip dujour, a furious young dad in a parked car bellows into his phone camera about Covid-vaccine mandates. “For the kids to go back to school, they have to be f**king vaccinated,” he shrieks, tommy-gunning his screen with spittle. “Are you kidding me?” Then he turns one drawn-out, modern-dance “f******ck!” into a quivering warning for all liberals to unfollow him. This is 43 excruciating seconds of tough-guy posturing on TikTok, the app featuring children recording themselves dancing to “Fancy Like.” He’s not scary, but this is: TikTok’s algorithm – the nicotine behind the app’s addictiveness – fed his rage to millions. Some saw it and thought: Now, that’s a patriot. And it confirmed their hunch, even as the bodies piled up, that Covid can be bullied and patrioted away.
It’s taken a couple decades to reach this point, at which we surrender vast portions of our continuing education to the algorithm. At the same time, we shout down the real-life experts whose advice contradicts our hunches. In anatomical terms: The head and the gut have pulled a Freaky Friday, and we need to swap back fast or else we’ll wind up dead. Or worse: dull.
The shift started breezily enough. In 2003, the journalist Michael Lewis published Moneyball, one of the very few books about statistics to have become a Brad Pitt movie. In both, Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane replaces the hunches of his veteran talent scouts with data, which results in a better, cheaper team. Fine for baseball, but over time the tech giants – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Quibi – cut human curation out of the equation, creating complex algorithms that determine the news, music and TV we consumed.
Tragically, now the machines make us mix-tapes. Behold my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist, where advanced data analysis, machine learning, and let’s say algebra come together to deliver new music I will find sort of pleasant. The algorithm knows the jangly guitar tone I gravitate toward, the plaintive vocal I tend to enjoy. It serves me what I like, but I never fall in love. The songs are scientifically skip-proof, but they flit in one ear and out the other. As well as the algorithm knows my behavior, it doesn’t know me. It doesn’t know how I’ll react to the marketing of the artist, or whether I’ll be attracted to the drummer, or any of the million ineffable qualities that connect a person to music. It can’t be the friend who gives you a Superchunk record on a hunch, thereby changing your life forever.
It cannot set you up for self-discovery. It just gives you more of what it knows you like – be it bro country or news posts that make you feel like an immunologist because you don’t want to wear a mask – and pushes you to be more of who it knows you are. It can’t change you. You won’t evolve. The machine won’t do its job as efficiently if you do.
So it makes sense that we launched a revolt against the data. In the face of major global problems, we’ve chosen to trust our hunches over the facts. We say, “Nearly every climate scientist concludes that climate change is real, man-made, and certain to devastate the planet unless we take action right the fuck now, but on the other hand, it’s nice out.” We’re desperate for agency, so we let our gut lead us where we already wanted to go. The algorithm does what it does, reinforcing those bad ideas by showing us posts expressing the same feeling, and then there we are. Satisfied and immovable, in a feedback loop to hell.
I won’t forget the last hunch I really fell for. In mid-March 2020, we were gathered at a bar just beginning to wonder if we should be gathering a bar. Things looked grim, so we were susceptible to the gut feelings of the confident. “It’ll be over by early May,” my friend Brian said, “and it’ll just look like a bad flu year.”
We all agreed because it felt good to agree. There, see? Brian thinks everything is going to work out. It was easy then to ignore the tiny voice in my head telling me what I didn’t want to hear: There are not the words of an immunologist, based on data, historical parallels, and modeling; this is the hunch of a guy who writes advertising copy for Count Chocula.
Good hunches, like book recommendations and blind dates, create serendipity and inspire growth: Something makes me think you’ll like this. But hunches get sketchy when they reject data and common sense: He won’t be any worse than Hillary. Ultimately, the hunch that we won’t be here for the long-term consequences of our snap decisions is probably correct.
The man in the viral video isn’t really raging about vaccines or liberals; if his kids are in school, they’ve gotten a dozen mandated shots. These aren’t his enemies; they’re just where the news algorithm directed his anger. He was already furious, because he’s among the millions of Americans who had a hunch – Covid wont be a big deal – and reality crashed into it like a freight train hitting a Smart car. He wanted to go from his gut and make his own rules, like Die Hard’s John McClane, and now has to follow the orders of Young Sheldon.
In Freaky Friday, selflessness gets Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan back into their rightful bodies; they come to understand each other’s strengths and their own limitations. And so it can be here. There is room for both your hunch and all the raw data analyzed by experts. Let your hunches do what they’re qualified to do, like compel you to reach out to that friend who you think may need to talk. Let the CDC do what it can: assure you that a vaccine is the quickest way back to a world we recognize.
And for God’s sake, go make someone a playlist on Spotify.