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social<br>media algorithms: accumulated aesthetic artifacts
henderson reed hummel
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social<br>media algorithms: accumulated aesthetic artifacts
published: 2026-07-18
A few years ago, before the agent hype was quite so feverish, I had<br>begun to work on a blogpost about how social media algorithms map quite<br>neatly onto the older “software agent” concepts of the 1990s (and<br>before. Essentially, the idea of those earlier agents is that<br>they’re a self-contained, interactive objects with internal state and<br>the ability to communicate.
Which is really just the same as a social media algorithm - there’s<br>two-way communication (e.g. you like, linger on, or share a piece of<br>content (which tells the algorithm you like it) and then it shows you<br>more), they’re relatively self-contained, they’re interactive, and they<br>have state.
That state gets improved over time through re-inforcement - there is<br>a special set of numbers, vectors that represent your own historical<br>behavior and preferences. This is the meat-n-potatoes of a<br>recommendation algorithm. Those vectors get updated over time, and<br>eventually, they accrete into an artifact.
That artifact is what so intrigues me!
Somewhere, on Instagram’s servers, there’s a magic packet of numbers<br>that describes my aesthetic interests. I want it! Let me see it -<br>there’s something for me to discover there.
Aside from my own selfish interest, I bring this up because<br>I’m fascinated by the way social media might have changed our brains. I<br>was thinking earlier today about the profound difference in aesthetic<br>movements between the 1990s and the current day, mostly because I think<br>(based on no particular real data) that the average person<br>today is much more aesthetically consistent.
I don’t mean that people today are more fashionable than<br>people in the past, or that everything looks the same. Rather that on an<br>individual level, people are more aligned with a particular aesthetic<br>philosophy than in the past. Social media and online shopping has raised<br>the threshold by which people are evaluated on their aesthetic taste,<br>and reduced cost of manufacturing has made it feasible to make extremely<br>niche products targeted at specific aesthetic cohorts.
The social media algorithms encourage a sort of aesthetic<br>echo-chamber, where-in people are exposed to a gradually narrowing<br>conception of what is fashionable. At the end of it all, you have a<br>crystalline shell of user embeddings that represents a distinct set of<br>aesthetic interests - an artifact that describes what you like.
I think this is maybe one of the most compelling arguments for<br>data-ownership. If I can’t have that data, why should a<br>mega-corporation, one almost certainly aligned against my interests?
some links that have been percolating to produce this post:
gwern: guardian<br>angels
derek<br>thompson: the unicontext
hister
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