The Algorithm Learned My Taste. I've Forgotten It

Every song it plays is exactly what I would have chosen. That is the problem. I no longer know what I would have chosen, because I have not chosen anything in three years.

The playlist is called For You. It is updated every morning. It is uncanny in its precision: the song that matches my mood before I know my mood, the obscure B-side I mentioned once at a party. My friends are jealous of my playlist. I have started feeling like a stranger to it.

I tested it once. I let it play for a month without skipping. It was flawless. It was so flawless that I could not tell where I ended and the model began. The songs it chose were the songs I would have chosen, which meant that my taste had become a prediction, and the prediction had become the thing itself.

Here is the quiet horror: I have stopped seeking. I used to fall down holes for music, the way you fall for people, recklessly and without explanation. I would chase a strange cover version to a stranger band to a stranger genre. The algorithm does not do that. It has never once been lost. It has never once been wrong, and being wrong, I am realizing, is the engine of taste.

My daughter asked me last week what my favorite album was. I opened my mouth and said the name of a playlist. She looked at me the way you look at a person who has forgotten their own address. I have outsourced my curiosity, and curiosity is not a preference, it is a muscle, and the muscle has atrophied.

I turned off the recommendations yesterday. The app asked if I was sure. It offered to save my taste profile for when I came back. I said yes, because I am weak, and because some part of me is afraid that without the algorithm I will not know what I like anymore. It has learned me so completely that I have forgotten how to introduce myself.