What if the algorithm doesn’t see you? Not your story. Not your intentions. You’re just a pattern. A cluster of pixels. A trend line.
The algorithm doesn’t know who you are. It guesses based on your location and the people nearby. How they scroll. What they click.
To the machine, you’re not a person. You’re proximity. A shape in a grid. A figure surrounded by noise. Does this sound scary?
What’s scarier is that this logic comes from human psychology. Particularly, the Gestalt principles. Originally made to help us find meaning in chaos, but now used to trap us in it.
Gestalt
According to Gestalt psychology, we don’t see the world piece by piece. We group things and simplify, turning chaos into patterns.
We don’t process individual or separate parts, but see wholes. Our minds group objects based on closeness, or proximity.
- Commonalities in color, shape, or motion imply similarity and common fate.
- Completing unfinished images, closure.
- Isolating what’s important from the background, figure-ground.
Gestalt principles are not just visual tricks. They help us navigate complexities and survive. But once technocrats learned to replicate them, these tools for perception became weapons of persuasion.
— POTB
Algorithms
Today’s feeds are built like optical illusions. They sort, group, and rank, not by meaning, but by pattern.
Videos uploaded from a similar location are assumed to have a similar tone, energy, and topics. So they get bundled together. It’s a common fate.
On TikTok, every tile is a figure isolated against a dark ground. The ones that pop? That’s basically figure-ground.
Spotify groups based on similarity, tempo, genre, and mood. Netflix suggests what’s popular in the local area.
Algorithms don’t see people, let alone individuals. They pinpoint relationships between data points. They group us the way Gestalt groups objects.
- Close = related.
- Similar = the same.
But there’s a catch.
Machines Aren’t Human
Gestalt principles were never about logic. They were about perception. Human perception.
We group things emotionally, influenced by experience, intuition, fear, and desire. We exercise our innate freedom of choice. Algorithms? They don’t perceive, feel, or know. They calculate.
You’re not a thinker with a soul. You’re an object with behavioral data. When you create something online, the algorithm doesn’t care why or how. It only cares if it fits an expected pattern. So, you’re not being seen, but sorted.
The Consequences
This is why content feels repetitive. It is why your favorite creators make that same video on how you should join the creator economy, where amazing opportunities are supposedly everywhere.
They flatten themselves into tropes, exaggerating the parts that pop. Not because they want to, but because the machine doesn’t reward complexity, but simple shapes.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi taught us to increase self-complexity, but the algorithm disagrees. It favors obviousness that it can group and label as “clean,” or more so as “digestible.”
So people simplify themselves to be seen, becoming more objects than humans; Pieces of code performing as expected.
They don’t notice it’s happening, but call it “best practices” and “growth hacking.” They don’t optimize for humans but for algorithms. No creativity. No freedom of choice. Just adaptation to a non-human eye. And plenty of “Hey Guys.”
Reminder
You are not a figure in someone else’s feed. Not a proximity, similarity, or motion. You are the context, the whole scene, and maybe even the culture itself. If the algorithm can’t see that, maybe it’s time to stop serving it.
Erase labels with your being. Break patterns with your work. So, it makes people stop. Not because it fits, but because it doesn’t.
Because it reminds them: this whole system was built on a misunderstanding. It mimics how we see. But it will never understand why we see.
CTA
So if you’re tired of being shaped like an object, you know what to do.
Disrupt the feed. Or better yet, go and do something in Nature. It’s an amazing opportunity, you’ll appreciate sooner or later.
— POTB
Thank you for your time!