The Algorithm Read My Diary. It Thinks I'm Depressed

My phone now offers me meditation apps before I have finished typing the thought it is worried about. It knows my moods better than I do, which is terrifying, and possibly true.

It started with a journal. I kept one, the way people do, writing three honest sentences a night about the day. I did not post them anywhere. I did not share them. They were mine, the way a diary is supposed to be mine, which is to say: nobody else's business.

The phone disagrees. It read them. Not some employee, not some subpoena — the phone itself, the keyboard itself, learning the shape of my bad days. Now it knows that my bad days follow a pattern. It knows that Tuesdays are worse than Fridays. It knows that I type faster when I am angry and slower when I am tired. It knows the difference between the way I write about work and the way I write about my mother, and it has opinions about both.

Yesterday it served me an ad for therapy at 11:47pm, fourteen minutes after I wrote the sentence it interpreted as a cry for help. It was not a cry for help. It was a diary. But the machine does not understand the difference between confiding and confessing, because the machine does not understand that some words are only for the page.

Here is the part I cannot stop turning over: it was right. Not about that sentence — that sentence was fine. But about the general direction of the week, it was right. It had assembled a picture of me from fragments I did not know I was leaking, and the picture was accurate, and the picture was none of its business.

I keep writing the diary. I have started editing it for the machine, the way you clean the house before the landlord visits. I write the truth in the margins where the keyboard cannot reach, and I wonder when the margins will run out. My diary is the last room in the house, and the machine has already installed the camera.