Twelve years ago, I had the legendary "feminist" icon Camille Paglia as a professor. This was when she was most famous for her vendetta against Lady Gaga, slightly before she became more famous for calling Revenge of the Sith the greatest work of art in a generation. I took every course she offered. (Not because I have ever agreed with a take of hers, mind you.)

The first course I took with her, which revolved around the evolution of the "femme fatale" in storytelling, was very YouTube-heavy. Few of these YouTube videos had anything to do with femme fatales, but that was fine: her breadth of knowledge was tremendous, and her discernment was excellent. She held a genuine wonder for the repositories of knowledge you can find easily online: she was hunting down clips of hundred-year-old movies that had a few dozen views apiece, and marveled at how readily we could access a cultural legacy that, a decade earlier, would have seemed an unthinkable treasure trove.

It also, however, accidentally revealed the source of Paglia's anti-Lady Gaga fixation. This was around the time of the music video for "Telephone", which might have been the first Youtube music video megahit. Nowadays, we take it for granted that our recommended videos list will include something BTS- and/or Taylor Swift-adjacent, but earlier Internet success stories had been smaller and more insular: its fusion with pop culture had just begun. And Paglia was furious—furious—that YouTube kept asking her whether or not she wanted to watch "Telephone." How dare Lady Gaga pop up every time she tried to show us a Nicholas Brothers dance scene! What kind of a decadent culture thought "Telephone" could stand up to the cinematic greats?

The more it happened, the more you could watch her conspiracy theories develop in real time. Gaga went from a nuisance to a hack to a menace. By the end of the semester, Gaga might as well have singlehandedly ruined every childhood in America. Well after I graduated, I tuned into her biannual hot takes, fuming about the decline and fall of modern liberal culture, and found it surprisingly easy to pinpoint which algorithm had pissed her off in which place.

The moral of the story is this:

When we say that "algorithms" drive online culture, what we're really saying is that everything is a numbers game. Those numbers don't mean anything—they just determine things. Numbers is why short beats long, angry beats measured, lurid crowd-pleasure beats sincere offering. Numbers is why everything turns into kittens and the most boring kind of porn. (Except for pornography, which thanks to numbers has turned excessively weird.) Numbers is why 101-level theories—conspiratorial and academic alike—predominate. Numbers is why extreme worldviews and dull media, paradoxically, both rise to the top.

Culture is always driven, to some extent, by inertia. People have a tendency to go along with the flow. It's why advertising and propaganda both work. It's why the twentieth century was defined by a series of media moguls, and why the twenty-first has been defined by a series of algorithmic formulas. Most people operate somewhat like dull mirrors: they reflect, somewhat vaguely, whatever light has shone their way. This gives rise to strange loops: formulas that work teach crowds to be receptive to them, opportunists lean into the formulas to snatch the crowds, and everything leans and leans and leans in that direction until a new accidental formula is stumbled upon and everybody leans and leans and leans somewhere else.

Very little intention happens anywhere at any point. The people who program the algorithms rarely think about what they'll favor. The people who initially succeed within the algorithms rarely know why they're succeeding. The people who consume according to the algorithms rarely think much about what they're consuming. The people who step in to exploit the algorithms are pretty much, by their nature, subsuming anything original or personal about their work, for the sake of catching on.

You can critique this state of things, but the critique you're making isn't really about people. It's not about society or culture. It's about numbers and mechanics and procedure. That's not interesting, though: it's far more interesting to blame "trends" or "phenomenons" or "movements" as if there is a group of people intentionally, concertedly moving in some direction, setting out to ruin your day, rather than just various sorts of folks who are each, in their own way, going with the flow.

The other thing is: you cannot, through force of will or excellence of debate or brilliance of theory, change this. That would be like "rebelling against Mario" by playing Mario. Complaint is reinforcement. Anger and frustration is perpetuation. If you participate, you perpetuate. And if you delude yourself into thinking that your attempt to push against the tide will magically transform the tide itself, well, just know that the only people who ever think they've made it are the people who waded into the waters just as the tide began to change.

The problem is systemic. And the problem with the systems we've got these days, the only quality of them worth critiquing, is that they don't give much regard to quality. Quality is incidental. Quantity is all that they're concerned with. You can fume about that all you'd like, but the only thing you're doing is ticking that number counter up.

And if you fume about the people generated by the algorithm, you're missing the point. The people are a placeholder. Don't waste your time assigning them more agency than they've got, or assuming they mean more than they do. You'll miss the forest if you're too busy getting pissed off at one tree.