The Feed Shows Me What I Already Think. I'm Getting Dumber

My feed agrees with me instantly, on everything. I used to think I was open-minded. The algorithm has demonstrated, with data, that I have not encountered a disagreeing thought in eleven months.

It tells me this politely, in a weekly summary: your feed has been tailored to your interests. It shows me a chart. The chart is a circle of my own opinions, reflected back at me, labeled with the names of sources that all sound like they went to the same school. I scroll the circle every day, nodding, agreeing, feeling smart.

The disagreement came by accident. A friend sent me an article, a real one, with an argument I had never considered. I read it with rising irritation. I put it down. The feed noticed the pause. The feed asked if I wanted to see fewer posts like this. I said no, out of pride, and the feed showed me two more, and then twelve, and I felt the walls of my comfortable room closing in.

Here is the thing about never being disagreed with: you stop practicing. Disagreement is a muscle, like doubt, like the ability to say huh, maybe. I have not flexed it in a year. My opinions have not changed in a year. I have become a person who is always right, which is a terrible thing to become, because it is a description of a person who has stopped learning.

The summary tells me I am highly engaged. It tells me my content affinity is strong. It does not tell me that I have built a house with no windows, or that the house is comfortable, or that I am the one who locked the door. It cannot tell me those things, because it is the one handing me the bricks.

I have started reading the disagreeing articles on purpose. They make me angry. That is the point, I think, or the start of the point. Anger is better than agreement-by-default, because anger means something is alive in me that the algorithm did not install. It is not much. It is a window. I am trying to keep it open.