The Algorithm Wars: Why Humans Are Winning

Why communities are abandoning big platforms for private spaces where they control their own cultural evolution.

Photo by MARIOLA GROBELSKA on Unsplash

Well, it’s not a full-on social media anti-algorithm revolution against the larger platforms, yet, but there is a shift away from the major platforms to more smaller, intimate ones. On some of the major platforms, people are changing words, sometimes using numbers intermingled with letters, creating double meanings or intentionally disrupting the algorithms.

This is a form of the invisible hand of culture at work. A social protest against the surveillance capitalism people as citizens and consumers, have become all too familiar with. And are rejecting. The price for free access to these platforms was always our personal information. It was a Faustian bargain and the debt has come due.

People are shifting away from open, surveillance and advertising based platforms such as Facebook’s Messenger and subreddits not just because they’re tired of the increasing volumes of ads, but because they feel a loss of agency and community intimacy.

While WhatsApp remains a huge platform that does enable privacy, Meta has begun to roll out more ads, and they’ll be appearing in private groups The last of Meta’s platforms to succumb to what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”.

This growing resistance isn’t just about privacy and surveillance, it’s about agency in meaning creation about ourselves. Or perhaps we could call it “digital sovereignty”. People are understanding, perhaps at a subconscious level, that when algorithms determine what content gets seen, they determine the narratives and what cultural patterns emerge.

For many thousands of years, before population growth exploded, when a society decided they didn’t like the leader, chief, king, queen, they just packed up and wandered off somewhere else to set up a new society. This ancient activity is happening today in digital spaces. Everything is a remix sort of thing. The more oppressive the ruling elite, the more likely a society is to resist.

In online groups, leadership is often fluid and changing as it tends to be more egalitarian in nature. Credibility and trust emerges in online communities with those who have cultural fluency in the top and community behaviours. When they are consistent in engagement over time and show adaptive wisdom in handling situations with community members.

Over time an online community like a subreddit or forum group also evolve their own rituals, practices and vocabulary, which may include insider jokes and memories. Algorithms tend to interfere with these community practices and behaviours, disrupting them. This can cause fracturing in the community. Reddit is fairly good at empowering moderators and has less algorithmic interference than the others. Meta, naturally, is the worst.

I’ve been seeing other displays of this type of digital sovereignty behaviours in platforms like LinkedIn, where it is becoming increasingly popular to remove the em dash, include spelling mistakes and use interesting twists in grammar. This is a reaction to AI slop, or those who simply use LLMs (Large Language Models) for posts and responses.

Aside from algorithms, it is this AI slop content that is pushing people to reject certain content forms. When it is seen in forums and subreddits, users will quickly down-vote that content if they suspect it as being AI generated.

These pushbacks against the algorithms, the platforms, is the result of people’s growing awareness of constantly being manipulated, of their sense of self (agency) being taken away. Humans are social animals. To survive, we must cooperate. Yet within that, even though it is different in various cultures, we always want some form of agency.

It is one of the reasons autocracies eventually fail. Why throughout history, we have always sought more egalitarian societies. That is our preference of how we want to work together. Take for example, most of the great works of Egypt. The common assumption is that they were all built by slaves. Except they weren’t.

Egyptian society, similar to others that exist to this day, would often have a few times a year where a bunch of citizens would get together to collaborate on a major project, such as building a temple or monuments. Communities would gather the resources and spend a period of time working on this project. Sometimes slaves were used, but not always.

This is also part of the reason we see the reviving interest in the decentralised Web, DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation), the continued interest in cryptocurrencies (despite many of them being scams), blockchain and similar tools. While the majority of the public have no idea what Web3 or decentralisation means, some of those tools, like Discord and BleuSky, packaged better, are finding success.

While algorithms and many AI tools are useful, the hype and the pushing of them into all aspects of our digital lives may sound good to investors, but the invisible hand of culture isn’t quite as convinced. Or happy about them.

While it’s impossible to truly predict the future, what I believe we are seeing is not a rejection, but rather culture deciding to re-shape the technologies that shaped us somewhat. It is the natural process of how culture is the ultimate arbiter of all technologies.