The Buffet Chef
Artwork is “The Chefs Boy” by Édouard Mentha
Ahhhh yes, the algorithm – usually viewed as a supernatural force with some identifiable mood disorder which is actually super flattering to the machine and embarrassing for everyone else, because what users call “the algorithm” is not, like, a digital warlock in an ominous chamber deciding whether your carousel of Mykonos pics has merit — it is a set of ranking systems that gather posts that align with what Meta favors (primarily boobs) and predict how you are most likely going to react to them and stacks the deck accordingly. It seems like nothing but a middle school popularity contest, but trust me when I tell you that it is so much more.
I find this way more revealing than the spooky folklore version, because the real issue is not that ranking exists but that it is constant, totally private, adaptive, and built from your own impulsive crumbs of conduct, including whether you pause, where you hover and zoom in, which videos you replay, which sexy selfies of your ex that you save, what you send, and where you loiter just long enough for this little creep to decide that your hesitation has market value.
What the system wants to know is what you are most likely to touch, stare at for over a minute, resent, forward to your girlies, or keep nibbling at long after it stopped being nourishing. Explore, for example, has been described as a system that first pulls from a humongous pile of possibilities, then scores them, then scores them again, then gives the pile one last shuffle before serving it back to you like fish food. Pop quiz – which role does the algorithm play in the aquarium? Spoiler – it’s not swimming at all. It is the puppet master.
So, logically and metaphorically, why would an aquarium ever need a puppet master?
That’s another pop quiz.
Recommendation systems have been using the same old trick for years. First, the app rounds up a crowd of possible posts, then it ushers forward the ones it thinks you are most likely to bite on, which means the whole thing is not fate – it’s a highly processed buffet of fish food run by phantom statisticians. Even the word algorithm took flight in a much more innocent register, since it comes from the name of the ninth-century mathematician al-Khwarizmi and originally referred to a procedure for solving a problem. Now, it refers to a vast behavioral sorting scheme that memorizes and makes use of your idle cravings, your aesthetic preferences, and that sad little fib you tell yourself when you open Instagram for “just a second.”
Where things get kinda slippery is the black-box problem, which I vaguely referenced in Poking & Prodding. In plain English, it means that the system makes decisions affecting what people see and respond to, while the public (and researchers) cannot possibly inspect how those decisions are being made. It exists in a “black box” not only because the code is hidden but also because the entire mechanism is super layered, constantly adjusted, and only ever explained in corporate jargon, so users are left to make guesses about its habits from rumors.
This is why abstract posting as a probe (which was my creative approach) is not pointless — in fact, it belongs to the original logic of black-box auditing, which I explicitly referenced in Poking & Prodding, because once you vary the inputs by changing the tone, timing, cadence, syntax, visual density, emotional temp, and social cues, and then watch what gets buried, what gets prioritized, what confuses, and what attracts the yuckiest species of attention, you begin to see that the platform is not rewarding “good content,” whatever that is supposed to mean in a civilization where a karaoke birthday party and a war update can occupy adjacent squares. Posting, in that light, stops being personal expression and starts functioning as fieldwork, a way of tapping the walls to find the hollow spots and learn which reflexes the buffet chef finds especially delicious themselves.
That, right there, is my scheme.
The part I believe we should know is that the system is often praised as a mind reader, when it is actually up to no good — it is tracking your behavior rather than your critical thinking, neither of which it should have access to at all. Users are being way too generous when they say the platform is echoing their own taste back at them, because that reflection makes the process sound innocent. Meta’s engineering posts make the scale of the operation hard to romanticize in my book, with the company describing (in late 2025) a billion-dollar plan to scale Instagram’s recommendation system to over a thousand machine-learning models, which would kill the idea that this is a single formula buzzing away in your mom’s basement like a mechanical insect.
It is a swarm.
The real issue is not whether the algorithm is good or bad, but why so many people still talk about it as though it were, oh, just the weather… instead of straight up governance. When we use these platforms, we have got to understand that this is a private ranking system with sick owners who are engaged in foul play, and they have the power to turn your repeated exposure into a behavioral profile of you.
