I got a call from my newly retired father recently, asking indignantly why ads for funeral homes and will-writing businesses were following him around the internet. He hadn’t been googling anything directly related, but had looked up some medications for my grandmother. I suggested that perhaps this, combined with his age, had caused some algorithm to conclude that he might require these services imminently. We tried to laugh it off, but I could tell the incident had unnerved him.
Many of us have our own algorithm war stories. Sometimes they’re relatively trivial. Sometimes downright cruel. Londoner Melissa Elliott, 38, lost her twins in 2019, four months into her pregnancy, but continued to receive maternity-related advertisements on Facebook for months after. She told the Huffington Post that she was driven to repeatedly google “miscarriage” in the hope it would nudge Facebook’s blinkered algorithm to stop the fire hose of baby ads.
Elliott’s attempt to appeal to the humanity of the algorithms, to connect the dots between miscarriages and mummy yoga, is particularly affecting. Because that simply isn’t how algorithms work.