Somewhere in the writings of Buddhist nun Pema Chodron (https://pemachodronfoundation.org/), there is a passage in which she remarks that self-knowledge can arrive like looking in a mirror and finding a gorilla staring back at you. You feel horrible, just the worst.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because algorithmic social media (Instagram) is showing me a reflection of sorts, and I am not entirely thrilled about it.

The feed is, at this point, a scroll of shirtless gaybros. (and cats, but I feel the cats are a less pressing addiction). Torsos. Abs. The occasional bicep offered up like a religious artifact. I am aware, on some intellectual level, that I should close the app. I do not close the app. This is, apparently, me — or at least the version of me that Instagram has quietly assembled from my hesitations, my two-second lingerings, my late-night scrolling patterns. The algorithm does not know I am complicated. It only knows what made me stop.

The feeling of cringe one gets from learning aspects of one’s own social media profile is genuinely uncanny. It is one thing to have desires. It is another to have them handed back to you as a dossier. And when you get a clear sense that you are, by this evidence, kind of an asshole on social media, you find yourself asking the more uncomfortable question: am I an asshole in real life?

Guy Debord wrote in 1967 that social relationships had come to be mediated by images and that representations had quietly replaced reality.

He could not have anticipated the version where the spectacle learns your specific weaknesses and optimizes accordingly.

The feed is not showing me an idealized body in the abstract. It is showing me my idealized body. Assembled from behavioral data I didn’t knowingly provide. From hesitations. From 1am patterns. From the three seconds I spent on something I told myself I was scrolling past.

This is where Sontag keeps nagging at me. The aestheticization of the idealized male form — the torso as object, the body as spectacle — didn’t begin with Instagram. It has a longer and considerably darker lineage. What changes is the delivery mechanism. The delivery mechanism now knows exactly which version of the image will make you stop.

The libidinal hook is no longer broadcast, but it is personalized.

Which is what makes the gorilla in the mirror so unsettling. It is not just that you have desires. It is that those desires have been modeled, predicted, and fed back to you at scale. The algorithm has read you more accurately than you’d like.