Fall 2021 | Occasus | Issue 11.2

Fun with the Algorithm

I once got a YouTube ad for a phone game that I actually considered downloading. It opened with the main character lifting a sad little animated kitten out of a dumpster. The game description elaborated that you would spend the game rescuing sad kitties.
           
And then the protagonist turned the corner and did a cartoonish double-take at her boyfriend making out with a stranger. And my good mood Hindenburged and I thumbed the “Skip Ad” button.
           
I found it particularly offensive that Unimaginative Lily’s Garden Clone #17 soured my mood right before, of all things, a wholesome cat vlog. But then I remembered a neat little trick and, rather vindictively, decided to have some fun with the algorithm.

You see, for some reason, Google seems to think I live in Quebec, because every third ad I get is canned French laughter over the sound of some kitchen appliance. And for some reason legislation on commercial volume doesn’t apply to ads in French. Nothing like settling in for a music video only to be thrown six feet in the air by “CE S’APPELLE EXTRAVAGANT? PAR-CE QUE C’EST SUCCESS. Y’A RIEN COMME REECE™.”

(Don’t ask me why Google thinks I live in Quebec; the only video I’ve ever watched that had French in it was a Letterkenny clip. It’s been around a year since I deleted that video from my history and yet Google still insists that I buy all my spice in French.)

Anyway, the onslaught of repulsive ads in two languages led me to discover a neat little trick. There’s a way to tell Google to stop sending you certain ads. At the bottom of the screen you can tap the information button, which takes you to a pop-up menu with one of the options being “Stop Showing This Ad.” From there, you can choose reasons why you’d like to stop seeing an ad: repetitive, irrelevant, and inappropriate.

My typical selection is “repetitive,” as Google still has yet to learn that since I’m not a gamer I don’t have a consuming passion for the Top 10 Champions in AFK Arena™. The kitten ad had made me so irrationally angry that I considered using the “repetitive” hammer on every ad I got for the next few hours. But then I was struck by a potentially even funnier possibility; I could also report all my ads as “inappropriate” instead and have a chuckle at whatever Google decided to send me to make up for the naughty dishonest kitten ad.

I spent the next hour purging ads left and right. Murder mystery app? Had blood in it! Cheap Chinese game with bad punctuation? Pregnancy! Skin cream? Bare ankles! I imagined the algorithm reeling, panicking, revising its history, recalibrating equations. The search engine whose psychology-predicting notoriety had spawned documentaries, legislation and conspiracy theories, brought down by a petty teenager.

I left Google to sweat while I went for a hot chocolate and a panicked I-forgot-my-dog-was-outside search. When I came back, the algorithm was . . . quiet. Subdued, almost. It wouldn’t show me an ad for several videos. Even for the cat vlog channel that was perpetually monetized.

I did eventually get one before a news clip. The first sentence is burned into my memory:

“The secret to a controversial new female mind control technique is simple…”

I watched the entire two-minute ad. Don’t remember a single detail except that there was no nudity.

Alanna Zorgdrager is a third-year student of English literature, aspiring to an honours specialization in creative writing. She writes primarily in speculative fiction (science fiction in particular), historical fiction, and any work of literature that involves worldbuilding, but also enjoys and makes effort to sample literature across genre and form. She was the winner of the 2020 Avie Bennett Prize in Canadian Literature. Alanna enjoys reading, playing the piano, and teaching herself Russian on the internet. Her favourite novels are Fyodor Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" and Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga’s "The Courage to be Disliked."