‘Spotify seems to think I want to hear a 1972 live album by Yes’
Alexis Petridis
There are many things I love about Spotify – its convenience, the way it allows me to spy on what my friends are listening to or check their “best of the year so far” playlists for music I might have missed – but the Discover feature is not one of them. I can’t help finding it a bit creepy, partly because it just is – a musical recommendation from a friend whose taste you trust is patently not the same thing as a computer trying to predict what you’re going to do next – and partly because I read enough science fiction as a kid to know that this kind of thing is invariably the thin end of the wedge. One minute the computer is all nicey-nicey and “Can I help you with that?” and “You just listened to Fleet Foxes, perhaps you’d like to hear the new Sufjan Stevens album?” then the next thing you know, humanity has been condemned to live in vast subterranean slave camps and forced to mine uranium for our new robot overlords.And besides, it doesn’t work – at least, not for me. This morning, its lists of recommendations and new releases consist of music I’ve either already heard and don’t like, or stuff I’ve no intention of listening to; it seems to think I want to hear a collection of 1972 live recordings by Yes, which I can assure you is not the case. I like to think this is because my music taste is so brilliantly eclectic that no program can hope to work it out, but in reality it’s probably got more to do with two other factors.
Firstly, when I’m writing, I use Spotify as a research tool, listening to all sorts of things I wouldn’t ordinarily listen to. Spotify is currently resolute in the belief that I want to hear novelty ska tracks, because I recently listened to 80s novelty ska band Bad Manners in order to make a joke involving Bad Manners in something I was writing.
Secondly, my Spotify account is linked to the Sonos system downstairs, which means my kids have access to it. And what my kids listen to is insane, as is the frequency with which they listen to it. You can never underestimate my daughters’ capacity to play the same song over and over again, way past any normal human being’s tolerance, up to the point where playing it again constitutes a violation of the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture. So my kids are effectively feeding the Spotify algorithm bad data – while I have nothing against the jolly one-woman Showaddywaddy that is Meghan Trainor, I can tell you for a fact that I really don’t like Dear Future Husband anywhere near as much as Spotify thinks I do, or indeed at all. And despite what my laptop seems to believe, I really, really don’t want to hear anything even remotely like it.
‘I think the guys from MatchesFashion.com have got inside my head’
Jess Cartner-Morley
Algorithms are the uncanny valley of online shopping, but fashion is the spookiest nook of all. If I log on to Amazon right now, it suggests that I might want to buy the Lorrie Moore book of short stories, a hard-to-find interdental brush and a geometry set. All of which is accurate, but would also be easy for anyone who had had a snoop in my handbag and knew the ages of my children to find out.
But the emails I get from fashion websites: man, these guys are inside my head. Matchesfashion.com, for instance, emailed the other day asking if I wanted to check out the new silk bandeau top by Raey, which, when I clicked on it, was the exact top I have been looking for – structured underneath with a loose top layer, a Raf Simons-Dior style straight line across the top. I was taken aback, in the same way that I used to be long ago about Amazon knowing my reading predelictions, before I came to accept that the tastes I once believed were individual are, in fact, cattle-prodded by the same stimuli as every other broadsheet reader out there. But this is different: I don’t have any strapless tops, because fashion being fashion I never wanted one, except now I suddenly do. And these people have read my mind.
The you-might-like emails I get about clothes aren’t based on the clothes I’ve got in my wardrobe, they are based on the clothes I’ve got in my head. (See also: a Chloe braid-detail denim dress, £235, which popped up just after I’d seen a woman wearing something very similar in the street, and started yearning for one.) Sometimes, this makes me realise to what degree I have been conditioned to want new trends for the sake of it. The really idiotic part of which is that it is arguably me, as a fashion editor, doing the conditioning on myself. Which is a bit like mis-selling a pension, or a packaged bank account, to yourself. Doh.
Another hey-there-Jess-we-thought-you-might-like email, which popped up, all innocent, recently: a pair of Nina Runsdorf emerald-slice drop earrings, suspended from a pave diamond chain. Full disclosure: I am obsessed with emerald earrings. But these are £7,830, and I have never once in my life spent anything approaching that kind of money on jewellery. Just occasionally, in my weaker moments, it is possible that I find myself looking at this kind of thing online. But I know it’s stupid, which is why if anyone looked over my shoulder, I would snap the window shut. And if you’re ready to snap the window shut, surely, that’s not even window shopping – it’s secret. Except there are no secrets in your browser history. Come to think of it, I’m a little spooked. Maybe it’s time for some retail therapy.
‘You can’t let it get to you. Netflix doesn’t know you’
Stuart Heritage
Netflix doesn’t email me often. Usually, its recommendations are reserved for its menu screen, where it will inform me that, since I recently watched Daredevil, it only stands to reason that I’d also be interested watching a documentary about meat.
So, when Netflix emails, it’s a big deal. It means that it has sifted through the labyrinthine intricacies of my viewing habits and determined that its big, new release is something I’ll stop in my tracks to watch.
It’s usually right. I liked House of Cards. I loved Kimmy Schmidt. So, earlier this year, I was thrilled to receive another email entitled: “Stuart, we’ve just added a film you might like”. I’d come to trust Netflix, so without a second thought, I rushed out and bought popcorn. I switched off my phone. I dimmed the lights and sat in front of my TV, frantically trying to calm my breathing. Then I opened my email.
The film was the 2011 Nicolas Cage vehicle Season of the Witch. The unloved Nicolas Cage film Season of the Witch. The one with a 9% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The one with the reputation for being so dull that not even ironic Nicolas Cage fans can appreciate it. The one that was on Channel 5 all the time anyway.
At a certain point, you take these wayward recommendations to heart. “Do I really look like the sort of person who’d enjoy Season of the Witch?” you ask yourself. “Is that really what these people think of me?” But you can’t let it get to you. Netflix doesn’t know you. Netflix is an automated system governed by a crude algorithm. It doesn’t know that you like long, contemplative walks in the park. It doesn’t know that you regularly donate to charity. It can’t see into your soul.
Obviously, I didn’t watch Season of the Witch. I watched Hancock instead.
‘Facebook’s closely guarded algorithm gives me the heebie jeebies’
Archie Bland
I don’t want any new friends, if I’m honest. I don’t see enough of the ones I already have, and I can’t necessarily always exactly remember their names or their marital status or what they do for a living. Relax the definition of “friend” to include the prefix “Facebook” and my doubts grow. I do not consider the fact that Herman and I were once at the same primary school a strong enough reason to be confronted with his opinions on Calais.
Facebook is not having it, though. No matter how exhaustively you think you’ve compiled a list of the friends and “friends” you’ve accumulated over the years, there is always a bottomless list of “people you may know”. (Twitter does the same thing, but much less worryingly, because it’s always fine to be offered the chance to see more footballers uploading selfies, if that’s what you’re into.) Nor are they necessarily people you wish to be reminded of. Home-town nemeses, lunatic exes, friends of your parents: Mark Zuckerberg would like you to reconnect with them all.
Weirder still are the times Facebook is actually right. Oh, yes, you think, I remember her from that thing, I’d love to see a picture of her cat at a party with other cats. And then you think: hang on, how do they know?
What you realise is that your online life is far more integrated with your offline one than you thought, and that it has happened without you noticing. A glance at my current list brings up at least four people who are entirely outside of my regular circle, and I can’t quite see how Facebook has worked them out. (Also, inevitably, an ex and a bigot.) One of them, a long-ago interview subject who I’ve never emailed from my private email address, and with whom I have no friends in common nor have ever been tagged with in a photo – the obvious means for Facebook’s closely guarded algorithm to do its work – gives me the heebie jeebies. I’m about ready to call the information commissioner when I remember that I, er, did have a look at his account when I was working on that piece. Who knows? Maybe he’s since done the same, and that’s how we’ve been connected.
Even with this explanation available, my heebie jeebies haven’t dissipated. Still, I guess I can live with it. Invasive though it is, it’s also the price of the free internet – and the price of that sense of connection that I still, despite myself, find pleasant. Plus, I’m glad I got to see that cat party.
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