Two Years Later: The Degeneration of Facebook
What is the "Bitch Algorithm"? The bitch returns for a farewell performance, at the end of which she throws out someone very familiar to you
By: A Bitch - But Before You
In reality, the breakup didn't happen in one day. For half a year, I would still occasionally return to my ex, late at night, when I was awake (awake?), for some disappointing hookup (and as bad as it was, it still managed to disappoint somehow, as if there was still some hope left in my heart). But the frequency decreased, and my relationship with my current partner blossomed (which led me to use my canine alertness at night in a more heartfelt way). And so from being the bitch ex of Haaretz, who exploited me for another hollow clickbait (and how unnecessary - since I have an ad blocker), I became a liberated and completely clean bitch and finally parted ways with Haaretz sometime at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
The truth is, I think the last time I entered was when Haaretz gave a platform to some denier, and I thought how low can one go (and here Haaretz wouldn't have resisted inserting Shirley Gal - or some other star who treads there, as I said, I no longer follow - or at least some "naughty" hint about the current partner's performance compared to him, just to show how low one can go). But honestly, there were no special nerves or great sadness, it just fell out of the browser window - like any page you no longer have the energy to check. Apparently, anyone who cancels their subscription in anger, like someone who is still angry at their ex, hasn't finished the relationship yet, and hasn't yet replaced the (hollow) sense of superiority of Haaretz readers over Ynet readers with a (more justified) sense of superiority over Haaretz readers themselves, who remained addicted to this garbage.
Yes, I felt my brain was going through a detox process. Less Haaretz - less Bibi, less gossip (now called #MeToo), less "the current bad boy of Hebrew literature". And yes, I admit, at first I would still go to Ynet, as a nicotine substitute. But I never belonged to the Tamka community, and to its Israel (Israel Hayom?), and so I gradually disconnected from current affairs in general. I looked for an alternative and tried Globes, but their blocking policy, even against ad blockers (he who comes to block you, block him first) and that same clickbait tendency that had already driven me away from Haaretz - quickly drove me away from it too. In Haaretz, just like with a guy who will say anything over and over just to get you into bed, every headline was an act of deception and fraud, where even before you enter the article you try to figure out where the manipulation is, and I had already learned to identify these toxic guys (somehow, they always hide behind a paywall and ad blocker blocking). Who wants such a relationship with the texts through which they stay updated about the world? Haaretz was more of a liar than Bibi, because "only Haaretz" readers are worse than "only Bibi" readers.
And so I arrived at my current kennel, which allows me to be Israeli without feeling Israeli, as if reading foreign news - in Israel. To smell a bit of what's happening on the street - without living on the street, to go with - and feel without (or vice versa?). Without idiotic rituals like the daily statement (did you hear what he said? How can one say such a thing!), without hearing about every peep of Bibi-anti-Bibi (but yes to hear if something really happens, quite rare in Israel, contrary to what you thought), without polluting our marital bed with reading about a girl's rape or a nationalist murder or the current harasser or a family that was killed (yes, I know you think it's your civic duty to read this garbage, especially if it's voyeuristic, pornographic, or snappy. But it kind of affects my libido, and even my soul. Even that of a dog). And here you will surely fall off your chair of honor, because I'm talking about Calcalist (who would have believed?).
Precisely because economics doesn't interest me that much (but it's clear to me that it's important and significant for real change in the world much more than any headline in Haaretz), I think Calcalist is the best refuge in Israeli media from the aesthetic and spiritual horror of Israeli media. No clickbait, the headlines are not inflammatory, the businesslike facade and objective cover are always maintained (and how important is that cover! Against the naked emperor that was Haaretz, who peed on thinking people in every morning headline from the diving board to mark territory). Even the design is solid and stable. And if by chance maybe (who knows?) Mozes is settling scores with business competitors, I have no way of knowing and it doesn't interest me and therefore doesn't affect me - because I'm really not the target audience (the bitch is not among the senior executives in the economy). Calcalist is an island of sanity in a crazy country, and the coldest place in hell. I enter once or twice a day, don't read too much, and leave happy and wagging my tail, without feeling that someone tried to pull it, kick me, bark at me, or worse: howl. Just an ordinary day in Israel. Saturday is for not crying out. A newspaper for sane people. Not addictive, and not selling, or pushing, any annoying agenda of nerves, and not trying to play with my limbic system.
But after cleaning the soot of institutionalized current affairs from my heart and lungs, something happened to me that often happens to those in recovery. For I never managed to understand - and looked with narrow eyes and disbelief - at all those intellectuals and academics and writers and critics and artists and journalists and other people of action who have time to read everything (and have already read all the classics, right?), also to watch everything (including trash series on Netflix, right?), and also to write about everything on Facebook (no?), and also to be updated on current affairs and what's in and what's not, also to maintain rich social lives, and also... when do you have sex? (Yes? No? Ahem. I noticed that many of them are divorced. Is there a connection?). And the jealous bitch, like any true daughter of a bitch, always asked herself: How? How?
Personally, I never watched series (who has time to waste? Life is short), but suddenly, after Haaretz, Facebook also started to bother me, because I suddenly noticed not only the degeneration of Haaretz - but also the degeneration of Facebook. My feed became less and less quality, the algorithm started to go crazy as if a bad programmer is playing with parameters and doing experiments on monkeys, and to spam me more and more (including with ads that are pushed despite the blocks), and the idiot Facebook even stopped respecting the 30 selected writers and pages I chose to put as "see first". How bad can an algorithm be? And why a maximum of 30, huh? Is someone here afraid of something? And why don't I even have the option to see the list of the most talked-about posts among my friends in the last month, say? Or in Israel in the last week? (For example). How hard is it to program something a little more reasonable? (It's not). And I see everyone writing as usual, and even more than usual, and I ask myself: Haven't you noticed that something got messed up in the feed? Is it just me? Is it me who changed, or you?
But someone who has recovered once - can't recover from that. I already knew that what needs to be done is not to disconnect (doesn't work, because I always returned to Haaretz like a junkie), but to find less toxic substitutes (Calcalist). And here a furry canine start-up came to my mind: Facebook for thinking people. Why not build my feed myself, without the cursed algorithm? As I write to you today, I haven't entered my Facebook feed for several months. But right above me there's a folder called Facebook, in my bookmarks, at the top of the Firefox bar in Linux (because Chrome is now becoming trash like Explorer, and Mac has become trash like Windows. And Linux Mint is incredibly stable, unlike past distributions, and flies so fast it's as if I bought a new computer - from a cart to a Jaguar. Move on, guys! Take responsibility for your digital lives. Oh, and "only iPhone" - is "only Bibi". Meaning: inability to imagine an alternative to an expensive and inferior product that pees on you in a rainbow, precisely because you are unable to imagine an alternative to it).
So you'll ask: How does the Bitch Algorithm™ work, which manages to create a better feed than all of Facebook's algorithm division (because the question is: better for whom...)? What's inside that redeeming Facebook folder? In total 5 subfolders, each containing between seven and ten people and pages I follow (my "see first", which are now no longer limited to 30, like in the mentally limited algorithm). And the folders themselves are arranged according to the "feed rule" set by our sages: frequent and infrequent - frequent comes first. The seven who update and write the most, among those I'm interested in following, I put in the top folder (for example: Quanta Magazine - the best page on all of Facebook, Assaf Sagiv, Yigal Livrant). Those who are a little less - in the second folder (for example: Minority Opinion, Big Science - in Small, HaYadan). And so on, down to those who update the least (for example: Kippy Explains Things, The Solid One, Marginal Utility).
All the nags, the inciters, the victimizers, the narcissistic show-offs, the panickers, the effusive ones, the banal ones, the sensitive-emotional-excited ones!3>, the justice warriors, the promoters, the avengers, the models, the princesses, the know-it-alls, the famous humble ones, the "intimate" in public, the flatterers, the preachers, the supporters, the offended, the huggers, the alarmed, those who give in "secret", the advisors, the social activists, the super egos, the I-accusers, the first to identify, the exhibitionists, the free radicals, the cheap poets, the spiritual teachers, the world fixers, the successful ones, the inflated ones, the loudly disillusioned, those who proudly beat their sins, the gossips, the quarrelers, the hurt ones, the good souls, the righteous and prime ministers who filled my feed in the past - I simply no longer see. As far as I'm concerned, all of them - and all the storms in a Facebook cup - were carried away by the wind and light. And in the last folder, of small sins, I put selected entertainment pages for leisure hours (for example: Cats Inciting to the Left, or various sensational sexual confession pages between lesbians and bisexuals of various kinds, without entering the male gender, sorry).
This is how I enter directly to the wall of the few quality people and pages that interest me, scroll down in the new posts until I see something I've already read in the past, and close the tab. No ads, no distractions, and believe me it takes (and wastes) much less time than life. One of the important tricks here, which is why it's important to arrange the Facebook pages in subfolders, is that each time I open an entire folder in one click, meaning 7 people/pages in 7 tabs, and go through them. You have no idea how much this simple arrangement improved my quality of life - and my spiritual nourishment. How didn't you think of this before, you stupid bitch?
But here another wonderful miracle occurred, which I didn't anticipate at all. The addiction - abracadabra - ended! In the past, it was hard for me not to enter Facebook, to the point that I decided to give up on myself and not fight it, but today Facebook has become a chore, which I really procrastinate, and enter it once every few days, or week. The addiction is engineered using dopamine bursts created by uncertainty, each time the brain is surprised anew by the next writer that appears in the feed, just like addiction to a crazy and unstable ex, or to a guy who hasn't decided if he wants you. How easy it is to make an informed decision in advance who you want to read, and how hard it is not to be tempted to read gossip and malice in real time! Some echoes of Facebook affairs still reached me, but only through responses of the selectively followed to some distant rumor, and not through an eruption of dozens of passionate posts or some bubbling witch dance, where everyone tries to show how righteous-right and moral-exemplary they are, or how wise and balanced, or witty and funny in a snap, and especially how much they themselves are a million times better than... or to contribute their two cents for free, out of the amazing generosity that nests in them for the public good. And when such echoes would reach me, I would hum to myself something we used to sing in the Ulpana [religious girls' high school] at the third Sabbath meal, when I was gazing in awe (and in retrospect in love) at my classmate with the angelic voice, who was just waiting to marry some guy: "Who is the man who desires life, loving days to see good (and not only in the Torah are days years, also in Facebook days accumulate to years from life spent in it) - guard your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn from evil - and do good". And then something would hum and trill in me with that same feeling of elevation and purification of the soul from then, because here, now I too can feel better than others, namely: better than you.
And here we come to the final point, my dear readers, which is necessarily also our point of separation. Because all this cleaning had another side effect that I didn't expect, much more radical - and certainly for us. Because you, friends, have disappeared. You no longer exist. I know, after all, my readers, that you are still reading in Haaretz, like a battered woman in an abusive and circular relationship, and like a dog returning to its vomit (I've been there). And I know that even after this article, perhaps the only time you'll hear about this practical solution to feed addiction, you won't implement anything, and won't even try, but will continue to scroll through the herd's droppings. My private process of resistance and weaning from the digital and media order will always remain exactly that - a private journey (and of course will not resonate on Facebook or be published in Haaretz).
But let me share with you a secret from the other side: after I stopped reading in Culture and Literature (and I was a devout reader), I gradually stopped being interested in "what they said at Tzipper's", and even less in "what they said about Tzipper". The entire media literary republic (as opposed to the real one) was revealed to me from the outside as it is - in all its wretchedness. Does anyone think that Israeli literature, the one that will be remembered in the future, is happening at Tzipper's and the like? (And if so, woe to it). Slowly, all the Israeli media engagement and local politics as a whole began to look to me like a terrible corruption, and not because of corrupt Bibi who does evil, but a irreversible corruption that we inflict on ourselves, much worse than anything Bibi ever did - the corruption of life. Who cares about all the garbage you care so much about? Because what happened to me, to my complete surprise - is that I lost you. He who removes himself from the community - denies the essence. Therefore, I'm also less interested in writing to you (after all, I'm not writing to myself, am I?...). What should I write to you, that I've seen the light and that you're sitting in darkness? What am I, bringing you back to religion (or maybe to questioning)? I'm not really burning to do so.
And so I finally understood what Facebook and Haaretz did give me, and what the price of giving it up is, and why I really left them (and you probably won't): an imagined community. And imaginary friends (after all, you were never really my friends, right?). A fantasy - about an audience and recipients. And what happened is that I simply can't be part of this collective fantasy anymore, which revolves in endless, repetitive circles, around its own worthless tail, like a rabid and flea-ridden dog that bites and barks at itself - but precisely out of an enormous sense of self-worth (and completely baseless). How can one live in this dump with such passivity, while giving up all self-sovereignty? After all, there isn't a day you're not on Facebook, right? There isn't a day you're not in Haaretz, is there? Do you have any idea how this whole thing looks from the outside? And I, as I said, to my joy and sorrow (but with no way back), have long been looking at the whole thing from the outside. Into their assembly, let my soul not enter (there's no point in talking about secret and honor anymore).
So I know that a critic isn't supposed to write in "I" and "you", that it just creates antagonism, but this is what I feel: antagonism. I see some ripple in the swamp, negative or positive, around some scribe or writer, and I think: what is this work to you? To you - and not to me. Because what do I have to do with you? After all, I know that if I wrote about the current affair, or about some known person (everything is personal with Homo sapiens), I would have readers and likes galore, but for what? Am I the one who lost you, or are you the ones who lost me? Am I the one who lost myself, or are you the ones who lost yourselves? These are hollow questions, like at the end of every relationship, when there's nothing left. And therefore if we started with a joyful farewell in the first paragraph, we have no choice but to end with it as well, unfortunately: here our paths part.