The new shirt I’m wearing popped up in my email one day as a recommendation from some algorithm. The email told me that based on what I like, I would like this shirt.

The TV show I watched last night was recommended to me because of what I watched last week. Spotify builds me a new playlist every week. My Kindle suggests my next book. A lot of people watch my videos because YouTube thinks they’ll like them. TikTok and Instagram don’t even bother to offer me choices anymore. They just feed me more “content.”

Our whole world is geared to help us consume. It’s a system that makes it as effortless as a goose fattened through a funnel, a calf shackled in a pen.

I am what I eat. The more mainstreamed “content” I am fed, the more I become the same as “most people.” I lose my individuality and quirks. I listen to pop music, read bestsellers, watch top-ten hits. I sink to the mean, a sliver of predictable data, a rosy maw suckling on a firehouse.

Technology threatens to peel away more and more of my individuality, sand off the rough edges that stick up and jam the works, that slow down the ineluctable conveyor belts of progress.

Except…

Except when I write something or draw something. When I go from gorging to creating. I make something that never existed before, something unique that only I can do.

Art is unpredictable. It’s different. It’s raw.

It comes out of me, a concoction of all the popular crap I’ve snarfed down but also of my lifetime of experiences — the red-headed kid I played with in third grade, the hiccuping bark of my uncle’s cocker spaniel, the sunlight on my grandmother’s counterpane, the pong of the elevator in my first apartment building, my college roommate’s bassoon, the Chito® fragrance of my dog’s ears, my sister-in-law’s shepherd’s pie.

They’re all in there, diced small yet still piquant.

No algorithm can contain all the nuances of my life’s experiences, but this sentence can, that drawing can. My creations contain and convey the irreducible, lumpy, bumpy, tasty essence of me.

It doesn’t matter if it’s “good.” It’s me, dammit.

In fact, the whole idea of good and bad, of 👍 and 👎 is just another infantilizing, facilitating mechanism of the world of algorithms.

There’s no real “good” or “bad” because authentic things don’t need to be compared and sorted. They just are. Like trees and sunsets and babies’ smiles. Their realness is always 👍.

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I vow to spend more time making and less taking. More creating and less consuming. That wonky expression of me is what makes me human and not a bot, a byte, an app, or a line of code. Not upgraded, not optimized, not perfect, not 💯and not trying to be.

Technology promises to make everything easier, faster, slicker, and more efficient. But that’s not necessarily better.

I suspect I need more resistance, more challenge, more bumps and curves, to force me to struggle upwards to where the view is pure.

I suspect I need to struggle to write this essay better, to work on my drawing skills, to redraw and redraw again, to mix my own colors, make my own ink, bind my own sketchbook, to sweat, to fail, to learn, to grow.

I live in a golden age of ease and miracles. But I won’t forget I am descended from scrappy, hairy creatures who survived over millennia of wandering and foraging, adapting and questioning. They remade this planet with their calloused hands and oversized brains.

I mustn’t devolve into a binger and a whinger, a taker, not a maker. I celebrate my imperfection and give myself an opposable thumbs-up. Huzzah!

Your pal,

Danny