We’ve all done it. We all should do it, at least occasionally. I do it ever few months, in fact.
I Googled myself.
For years, the result has been a modest list of links, many to my own websites, but often to a variety of articles from old jobs and public feeds from old accounts. It’s been a trip down memory lane.
When I Googled myself the other day, though: I was greeted with an AI summary of my digital footprint, and a generated outline of who the search algorithm thought I was as a person.
It wasn’t completely wrong, but it wasn’t a hundred percent accurate, either.
As a guy who spends his free time in the pursuit of creative public expression I gotta admit: I’m a little frustrated that all the work I’ve put into building profile and connections online in the last twenty years has amounted to a couple paragraphs in an LLM.
Search and social, after all, were the bridges between the stuff I was putting out there and the rest of the universe—but lately, not too many people are crossing it.
“Keep making stuff.” I tell myself. “People will find it. And if it entertains just one person, inspires one other human to keep the spark alive… maybe it was worth it. Right?”
This is a cross post from Of Poets & Processors.
Terms FROm this POSt
- algorithm
- The modern internet in all its forms is far too large for people to fully manage anymore without the help of automated systems. Any time an unseen calculation weighing our public profiles against what an app, website, or service chooses to show us, one of these automated systems is at work behind the scenes recommending product, ideas, politics, and friends. The invisible hand of fate has turned into a digital calculation so big we can’t understand it, and so complex it is often hauntingly accurate. If you are not afraid of the algorithm and what it has done to our society, you are probably not paying enough attention.
- job
- This is a fuzzy word for me as I write here. I am technically self-employed, the overseer of a little one-man Canadian consultancy corporation. Hustling for contracts is hard work tho, so I occasional look for more steady employment gigs that interest me, and allude to it in my writing.
