I wonder how feasible it would be to make something that would allow people to coordinate for consumption like unions for bargaining, parties for politics, or corporations for production. In particular I have in mind targeting entertainment and social media consumption because of the prevalence of recommendation algorithms here.
The intuition is that these algorithms are political computations: who gets the advertising traffic, what type of content is in demand, which consumers are catered to.
The thing being coordinated on is the consumer behavior; namely what people click on.
Examples:
like a union, but instead of collective bargaining to sell labor, it is collective behavioring[1] to consume content.
like the old website Massdrop, but instead of coordinated buying it is coordinated clicking.
like a political party, but instead of coordinating votes, it coordinates clicks.
like a company, but instead of coordinating work, it coordinates consumption.
Concretely, I have in mind something like a browser widget that overlays indicators of the most impactful consumption choice to make to influence the algorithm in the direction you want, such as an icon or a color filter. This would run over things like youtube, instagram, tiktok, etc.
Another way to think of this: a value handshake between whatever algorithm the company is using and an algorithm you would choose instead.
behavioring—by this I mean consciously conforming to a pattern of behavior so it shows up in behavior analysis, in this case consumer behavior tracking which is part of the function of recommendation algorithms.
I wonder how feasible it would be to make something that would allow people to coordinate for consumption like unions for bargaining, parties for politics, or corporations for production. In particular I have in mind targeting entertainment and social media consumption because of the prevalence of recommendation algorithms here.
The intuition is that these algorithms are political computations: who gets the advertising traffic, what type of content is in demand, which consumers are catered to.
The thing being coordinated on is the consumer behavior; namely what people click on.
Examples:
like a union, but instead of collective bargaining to sell labor, it is collective behavioring[1] to consume content.
like the old website Massdrop, but instead of coordinated buying it is coordinated clicking.
like a political party, but instead of coordinating votes, it coordinates clicks.
like a company, but instead of coordinating work, it coordinates consumption.
Concretely, I have in mind something like a browser widget that overlays indicators of the most impactful consumption choice to make to influence the algorithm in the direction you want, such as an icon or a color filter. This would run over things like youtube, instagram, tiktok, etc.
Another way to think of this: a value handshake between whatever algorithm the company is using and an algorithm you would choose instead.
behavioring—by this I mean consciously conforming to a pattern of behavior so it shows up in behavior analysis, in this case consumer behavior tracking which is part of the function of recommendation algorithms.