Stay Where It Knows You

I KNOW MY BODY BETTER than anyone, so I know the stiffness in my neck and the throbbing in my head are from a brain tumor that’s going to kill me for the next six months. When I think about how I got the tumor, it seems pretty obvious. Those signals coming off my laptop and my phone have been seeping through my skin for years, breaking down my neural structure and corroding my internal organs. I’ve been avoiding my reality for a long time, but tonight I finally accepted it. If I don’t seem worried, it’s because I’m not.

The first time I felt the tumor was during the Duke–Arkansas game on Thanksgiving night. I had a bowl of boxed stuffing in my lap, but I just couldn’t get comfortable on the couch. Every two minutes a blue banner would flash across the screen promoting some network show I’ll never remember. I don’t remember a single play. I don’t even remember who won. I just remember thinking maybe going to bed would help. So I laid down and writhed around for what felt like an hour before turning on the TV in my room, hoping the noise would knock me out like a baby listening to lullabies. Even with my eyes closed I could still hear the colors of the TV keeping me awake—that’s one of the side effects of the tumor. I kept tossing and turning, trying to line myself up right, and when I finally drifted off, I woke up just as fast to flickering images of American rivers on the screen. That’s when I knew the tumor had me.

There’s no time to be sad about dying, and there definitely isn’t any time to sit in a waiting room just to have a doctor tell me to detox off screens as if that would fix anything. Even if detoxing worked (which it won’t), you can’t function in the world without screens anymore. It’s impossible. That’s the whole problem.

I think I wouldn’t be so annoyed at how it was killing me if it did a more respectful job of it, though.

It feels like it’s got me in some kind of slaughterhouse, just pushing me down an assembly line. That’s what the algorithm does—takes every video you watch, every article you click, every stupid thing you pause on for half a second, and turns it into a label. It decides what you are before you even know. I’d give up my right to vote for the right to choose my own algorithm.

There was one guy I found outside my algorithm, though. Finding someone outside your algorithm is a lot like getting rich. You either work really hard for it or you just get lucky. I never earned my windfall, but I knew I was flush when I came across him.

It wasn’t even a video that drew me to his profile. It was a comment he made on a forum for fictitious professional wrestlers. But his comment had nothing to do with wrestling, which is what caught my attention. It was about the 2006 American League MVP race, and how if you really looked at it, Justin Morneau wasn’t even the best player on his own team, and how Joe Mauer and Johan Santana were more valuable to the Minnesota Twins than Morneau was, and therefore Morneau shouldn’t have been MVP. It was such a dynamite thing to say that I had to click on the profile just to see who wrote it. (That’s something I strongly recommend. When you read a comment or an article or a book, you should always look up the profile of the writer to help inform whether or not you should take what they say seriously.)

When I clicked on his profile, I saw he didn’t post a lot, but when he did, his thoughts ranged from detailed and articulate to biting cynicism. That’s how I knew he was a real person, too. There was no form or consistency to his posting. Still, nothing in his profile indicated who he was or where he was from.

My big break came when he posted in a thread called “What Are You Listening To.” He linked a few songs: mostly mid-2000s rap rock and smarter hip hop—Flobots, Atmosphere, Flypside, Lupe Fiasco. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I didn’t hate it. The great thing was he curated them all in a playlist on his YouTube channel, which also had videos he’d uploaded.

There were a little over twenty videos, all with double-digit views, of him shooting a basketball alone in a gym. Altogether they lasted about two hours. All of it was recorded on his phone with no editing—no music, no narration, no effects. Just the sound of the dribble echoing in an empty gym, the squeak of his shoes, the whipping of the net. What was most enchanting about the videos was how he didn’t seem to have any structure to his shot selection, but through the rhythm of his movement, I knew what shot he would take next. I became his eleventh follower. (I remember the number specifically because I had mistakenly thought Jesus had eleven apostles.)

I used to put those videos on for background noise sometimes, like when I was doing chores. There was a comfort in walking into my living room and seeing him shoot hoops on my TV. That was before the tech companies started throttling the videos with advertisements every two minutes in an attempt to strongarm me into buying their premium service. That pissed me off and I stopped watching.

A few years later, I took an edible and looked up his username. There weren’t any new videos, but he’d started a blog documenting his attempt to make and eat a healthy diet for less than $7.14 per day—AKA less than $50 per week. He posted the recipes and the macros and very rough snapshots of his creations, and he gave feedback on what he liked and what he’d do differently next time. It was all very compelling stuff. He used a crockpot so frequently that I even bought one, although I only used it a few times and now it sits in my cupboard.

He abruptly stopped updating the blog with no fanfare or payoff. I guess he just didn’t feel like doing it anymore. After that I searched his username on Twitter and found a profile, but it was blank—no posts, no pictures, no links—nothing.

All this time, I’d never seen what he looked like up close. I didn’t even know his name, just his profile handle. But then I found him on TikTok posting content regularly—hundreds of videos already uploaded. Then in the first video I clicked, without warning, I saw his face and I heard his voice. It was jarring. I don’t know what I thought he looked or sounded like before, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t his fault. You can’t change your voice, I don’t think, but something about the reveal left me feeling more disappointed than I’d ever felt. How could I hold it against him that he wasn’t the person I knew when I’d never really known him to begin with?

And actually, his content was the best it had ever been. I did follow him again, and if his videos made it onto my feed, I’d watch. But truth be told, I didn’t seek him out, and to his credit, he never imposed on me.

Last week, in a fleeting feeling of nostalgia, I wanted to watch the old gym videos. They were deleted. I looked up the blog, and that was gone too. So was his TikTok profile. And the internet wrestling site had let its domain lapse and was no longer available. He vanished without a trace and without a goodbye. I felt like I had the wind knocked out of me.

Around the same time, I noticed the content around me had gotten noticeably worse. I couldn’t sit through the opening scene of anything. Every song sounded like a placeholder. I’d scroll for an hour and nothing would register. That’s when I started feeling especially restless. At first I thought the algorithm was just recalibrating. But you have to know something: in this day and age, if you aren’t a part of the algorithm, then the algorithm will kill you with no quarter. I know that’s what it did to him. It killed him because he didn’t belong to me. It turned him into an example, and now it’s killing me, too, for the same thing.

If there’s a point to any of this, it’s that it’s not out to get you. It just wants you to stay where you’re supposed to be. So stay where it knows you. Stay where it keeps you safe.