On Wandering
The limits within the algorithm
Sentimentality for sentimentality’s sake is something I try to avoid. I think it’s cheap in an age where so much top-down modernity feels jarring and out of our control, which makes nostalgia at once seductive and sleazy. Dissolving oneself into the past is not a tenable way to cope with the present, nor is turning back the clock ever the answer, either practically or ethically. I am predisposed to being aware of this as someone who does think a lot about the past. In fact, oblige me while I do so now.
When I was about thirteen years-old, circa 2007, I used to spend hours wandering the streets of the internet, searching for anything cool but mostly for new bands to listen to. I would click on this or that link, turn down this or that alley, guided by instinct. And when I came across a promising album by an artist I had never heard of, I would pirate it and add it to my collection. The slow growth of my music library satisfied my teenage yearning to expand my personal universe, and served as the scaffolding for a tangible identity — one which I could earnestly claim precisely because I had labored over its construction, and with the impetus from my own wellspring. Not knowing anything about the band I had just found was part of the excitement. I would glean an understanding of the music and its place in my universe only by listening for myself and making connections from my own, inner raw materials. I’ll never forget the feeling of possibility and latent meaning that came from random, self-guided discovery on the web; the thrill of the hunt.
I was reminded of this while watching a video Q&A session with renowned chef Marco Pierre White. He has an astonishing memory, and I was struck by a particular recollection in one of his hypnotic stories:
I got off the bus…not knowing where I was going. Not knowing that that journey was me leaving the world I was born into and starting a new world. And so I walked down the hill. Don’t know why. And I got to the bottom of the hill and I saw a hotel in front of me called the Hotel St. George….I saw this little road which went round to the back of the hotel. I walked down this road, and then I saw this door. A turquoise door. I thought, that must be the kitchen door. I knocked on the door. And the truth is I never wanted that door to open. It opened. Trevor, the kitchen porter, opened the door to my new life.
The intuitive act of wandering — down virtual roads or real ones — has perhaps become irrelevant. I often think, if I were a teenager today, that being a student of mechanized suggestion, rather than of my own psychic navigation system, might lead me to possess a much shakier identity — one not constructed by my own laborious bricklaying, but merely organized from a menu of prefabricated parts. It is impossible to distinguish the acceleration of technology and industry from the progression of one’s age. I am older now, and, I suppose, like any other crutch necessitated by aging, I rely on an innovation to do for me what I used to do for myself: the Spotify algorithm.
The algorithm is my personal Hermes, traveling between me in my throne and the digital world “out there,” and I twiddle my thumbs in a stupor of apathetic convenience while I wait for it to bring me the spoils of adventure. I no longer wander, through the internet or down the hill, because I don’t need to. The world is mapped, with cacophonous scrutiny, in the palm of my hand; I know what lies in every direction. Mundane certitude in the form of data has closed the ineffable gaps that, to paraphrase Maggie Nelson, were once left open so that the divine may rush in.
My teenage wandering was aimless because my aim was intrinsically unknowable. Like Marco Pierre White, I knew not what I sought, but what I found was the making of a life. I can’t discern what of this freedom was my youth, and what was the lightness of an iPhone not in my pocket. Such is the particular perplexity of having been born when I was, being the age I am now, and trying (as we all do) to parse the metamorphosis of one into the other.
