Let's Just Admit it: The Algorithms Are Broken

I'm begging the tech overlords to let us opt out from their dystopia

Have you tried to get information on a product or service from Google recently? Good luck with that.

“Product recommendations broke Google,” declares tech journalist John Herrman, “and ate the Internet in the process.”

That sounds like an extreme claim. But it’s painfully true. If you doubt it, just try finding something—anything!—on the dominant search engine.

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No matter what you search for, you end up in a polluted swamp of misleading links. The more you scroll, the more garbage you see:

• Bogus product reviews

• Fake articles that are really advertisements

• Consumer guides that are just infomercials in disguise

• Hucksters pretending to be experts

• And every scam you can imagine (and some that never existed before) empowered by deepfakes or AI or some other innovative new tech

The Google algorithm deliberately makes it difficult to find reliable information. That’s because there’s more money made from promoting garbage, and forcing users to scroll through oceans of crap.

So why should Google offer a quick, easy answer to anything?

“How did the algorithm lead me from Sonny Rollins to J. Edgar Hoover? Is this some kind of cruel joke?”

Everybody is now playing the same dirty game.

Even (previously) respected media outlets have launched their own recommendation programs as a way to monetize captured clients (= you and me). Everybody from Associated Press to Rolling Stone is doing it, and who can blame them?

I remember when Rolling Stone mocked sellouts

Silicon Valley sets the dirty rules and everybody else just plays the game.

Welcome to the exciting world of algorithms. They were supposed to serve us, but now they control us—for the benefit of companies who impose them on every sphere of our lives.

And you can’t opt out.

For example, when I listen to music on a streaming platform, the algorithm takes over as soon as I stop intervening—insisting I listen to what it imposes on me. Where’s the switch to turn it off?

I can’t find it.

That option should be required by law. At a minimum, I should be allowed to opt out of the algorithm. Even better, they shouldn’t force the algorithm on me unless I opt in to begin with.

If this tech really aimed to serve me, opting in and opting out would be an obvious part of the system. The fact that I don’t get to choose tells you the real situation: These algorithms are not for our benefit.

Do you expect the coming wave of AI to be any different?

The painful truth is that we are still in the early stages. AI will take all that digital garbage and multiply it by a thousand. Or ten thousand. Or maybe more.

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I ought to share more examples. But there are so many. Where do I even start?

For example, Amazon’s algorithm suggests books I might enjoy. But the recommendations have gotten worse over time—much worse!—just like everything else coming out of the technocracy.

Not long ago, Amazon offered useful recommendations. I often bought books solely due to these suggestions. But I now laugh when I see what gets recommended—they are so poorly suited to my needs and interests.

For example, I received the recommendations below after doing a search for the recent bio of saxophonist Sonny Rollins. These books have nothing to do with Rollins—or the sax or even jazz (despite the term Jazz Age in a title).

Instead, Amazon is suggesting books on crime fiction, murder, and cryptology.

How did the algorithm lead me from Sonny Rollins to J. Edgar Hoover? Is this some kind of cruel joke?

Nope—it’s the new world order. Check out the small print—where it says SPONSORED. That gives you a hint. They could hardly put that word in smaller font, but there it is.

In all fairness, Amazon also steered me to some jazz books. But they gave precedence to ridiculously bad books that were almost certainly churned out by AI.

Who benefits? Not me.

This is happening everywhere. The search function on Facebook deserves a face palm. Navigating Twitter is like living in a gated community where you don’t get a key for the gate. Nextdoor has built an even worse neighborhood—so painful to visit that I need to write a separate article to do it justice.

But Spotify is my biggest sore spot—the grift that keeps on grifting. I love new music, but I’ve completely given up on streaming platforms as a source of music discovery.

I’ve never listened to a self-help podcast in my life, but the Spotify algorithm doesn’t care—and offers all of these for my consideration.

Spotify also recommends new music releases, but the first album on my list is three years old. I then check out its audiobook recommendations, and the top pick is a bio of Elon Musk—clearly the algorithm doesn’t know me very well.

It also wants me to listen to the Joe Rogan Experience.

I have a hunch it wants everybody to listen to the Joe Rogan Experience. Spotify just paid Mr. R a king’s ransom, and they have to recoup it somehow.

But the problem here is the same as with the others. The algorithm is not designed to help me—it just wants to manipulate me for the platform’s benefit.

When we encounter this in a retail store, it’s called the hard sell.

I’ve stopped shopping at many stores because of the hard sell. The sales clerks are too aggressive in pushing high margin items, and I’m fed up with it. But guess what? That’s now the algorithm’s job, and it is even pushier and more insensitive than the greediest sales clerk at the mall.

That’s what the algorithm is like nowadays—a pushy sales person who won’t take no for an answer. If it were a store, I could just walk out. But what recourse do I have when the whole Internet starts acting like this?

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The word algorithm sounds like a fancy tech term. But the word predates computers by more than a thousand years old—and actually takes its name from a person, the Persian polymath Al-Khwarizmi.

In medieval Latin, this man’s name inspired the term algorismus—the algorithm.

Algorithm sounds like a fancy computer term, but it was named after Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi

An algorithm is simply a way of applying rules to data. Maybe when it’s used in math, an algorithm is logical and irrefutable. But as soon as you try to control humans with algorithms, the process gets messy—and demands scrutiny.

That’s why the word is highly misleading. It implies scientific purity. Hey, don’t argue with the algorithm, because it’s just following the rules.

But who are the rulers who create those rules? What is their objective?

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For a start, here on some members of the government’s recently announced AI Safety and Security Board. These are the people who will protect us against abuses of technology.

• Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI; 

• Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft; 

• Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet;  

• Vicki Hollub, President and CEO, Occidental Petroleum; 

• Jensen Huang, President and CEO, NVIDIA; 

• Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO, IBM; 

• Adam Selipsky, CEO, Amazon Web Services; 

• Shantanu Narayen, Chair and CEO, Adobe; 

• Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD); 

• Kathy Warden, Chair, CEO and President, Northrop Grumman.

Does that list make you feel safer? Or does it remind you of that old proverb about the fox guarding the henhouse.

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The shills who want us to lick the (virtual) boots of the algorithms keep using the word progress. That’s another warning sign.

I don’t think that word progress means what they think it means.

If it makes our lives worse, it isn’t progress. If it forces me into servitude, it isn’t progress. If it gets worse over time—much worse!—it isn’t progress.

All the spin and lobbying dollars in the world can’t change that.

So that’s why I became a conscientious objector in the world of algorithms. They give more unwanted advice than any person in history, even your mom.

At least mom has your best interests at heart. Can we say the same for Silicon Valley?

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I know that some true believers in algorithmic control—which they embrace as their higher power—will be unhappy with these blunt truths. But if they want to refute me, they should skip the breathless promises of an impending Rapture, and instead do a few simple things.

These are easy to deliver:

1. Provide transparency on what goes into the algorithm.

2. Tell me who benefits from it.

3. Allow me to opt in and opt out (or create my own algorithmic rules).

That’s simple, no?

Those smart people at Google and Microsoft and Facebook and Spotify and Amazon could deliver all that in 48 hours. But they refuse—for all the obvious motives. Until they deliver on these reasonable requests, they don’t deserve my trust.

They don’t deserve your trust. They don’t deserve anybody’s trust.

Until they remedy these abuses, they ought to quit spreading their techno-optimist blarney, which—in the absence of these basic disclosures—starts to take on the bad smell of an excuse for greed and power.

It might be better for them to act now. When the stink gets too bad, even calling it an algorithm won’t work anymore.