Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a programmer realizes he’s living in an invisible cage, mediated by algorithms that keep him going through the dull motions of life — and he’ll stop at nothing to break out.
No, we’re not talking about the 1999 blockbuster “The Matrix.” Instead, this is the story of Max, a San Francisco-based tech worker who began to feel his existence was eerily robotic. While his journey to freedom didn’t involve slow-mo gun fu fights or a compelling bald mentor, it did come with its own action-movie worthy chaos — which he sowed by, ironically, embracing algorithms.
“There was something very programmed about the way I was living,” he told The Atlantic, contemplating the implications it had for his free will.
Like many a man, he then had something of an existential crisis while going to a bar with his friends. “The new hip bar is exactly where a computer would expect me to go,” he remembered thinking, recalling all the apps and platforms that sent him to the same spots perfectly optimized for his interests, without ever challenging him to try something meaningfully new and different.
Being a programmer, Max came up with a programmer’s solution. He made an app to summon an Uber that would take him to a surprise location in the city. Only the driver knew his destination. “His experiments were like uncertainty exposure therapy,” The Atlantic wrote. He visited a leather bar, a planetarium, and a bowling alley he never knew about on the other side of town. Soon, he became addicted to algorithm-ordained chaos, randomizing decisions like where he ate, the tattoos he got, and what music he listened to.
“In choosing randomly,” Max told the magazine, “I found freedom.”
Max even quit his cushy Google job in 2015 and surrendered himself to another algorithm he designed to choose where he should live around the world. For over two years, he moved from city every month or so, from Ho Chi Minh City to Berlin. No one could doubt his commitment to the bit.
But was this truly freedom? Certainly Max no longer had to deal with the agony of making decisions, but in relinquishing his choices to a randomizer, where did his own autonomy stand? Michel Dugas, a psychology professor at the Université du Québec, told The Atlantic that he saw random decision making as a way of avoiding responsibility, rather than truly embracing uncertainty.
This didn’t seem to bother Max — until he ended up at one particularly dispiriting destination. During a cross country roadtrip back in the US with his future wife, the algorithm brought him to Williamston, a rural town in the middle of North Carolina’s swamps — or in other words, nowhere. “What are we even doing here?” he asked himself.
Then Max had another “Matrix” style revelation. “When you live randomly, you create lots of noise, but that noise doesn’t really move in any particular direction,” he told The Atlantic. “I realized I was seeing all this newness but wasn’t building toward anything.”
Max is settled down with a wife now, and plans to start a family. But he still enjoys chaos in small doses, like randomizing what food to order from the menu. Max, in the opinion of The Atlantic reporter who eventually sat down to get dinner with him at a — yes, randomized — restaurant, wasn’t performative but “genuinely passionate about getting outside his bubble.”
“When you have a fixed plan, a fixed identity, a fixed routine,” Max told the reporter, “it’s easy to become trapped in a prison of your preferences.”
Max’s total embrace of randomness was perhaps a little overboard, but it’s a fascinating case study in how we deal with that powerful itch to break out of our molds. Futility is often the path we choose, and we recede pack into our rigidly structured lives. But even if leaving everything up to a randomizer isn’t truly the ultimate expression of free will, lying somewhere between the red pill and blue pill, if it helps you get over that paralysis you feel about your life, then why not?
Of course, this can take a grimmer bent in our age of ever more powerful algorithms and AI models, which are designed to keep you engaged by constantly serving up more of the stuff you’ve liked before. Many people now use chatbots for recommendations on what music to listen to and movies to see, to plan trips, and seek advice. The danger becomes that you end up trapped deeper in your comfort zone, never daring to hazard anything that AI figures isn’t a safe bet.
More on algorithms: Watchdog Issues Grim Warning About Letting AI Run Your Life
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