The algorithm of experience

Everybody talks about “the algorithm” these days, the invisible principle, or rather the collective set of them, that governs what’s delivered in our daily, individual interactions with the interwebs. An enormous slice of what we see and hear every day, the content that fills the container of our experience, is determined by hidden code. But there’s a deeper layer to consider: what might be called the algorithm of experience itself.

This is a metaphor just waiting to be extracted. In an age when the notion of “the algorithm” has become iconic, rising from the level of a mere technical term to become a universal, zeitgeist-level principle suffused throughout the cultural aether, it’s interesting to remember and reflect on how reality at large is essentially the expression of an algorithm that’s perpetually serving up everything that arises. And by “reality” I mean our individual experience—what Peter Brown, the late nondual spiritual teacher, helpfully characterized as our “experiential field.” Because at root, for each of us, it means the same thing. Reality is what’s experienced, what shows up. It’s all that’s ever encountered or known. Even thoughts or speculations about what might lie beyond immediate experience are only ever known in and as immediate experience.

This algorithm of your experience—which, again, is synonymous with reality, the only reality you can ever know—is fine-tuned with sheer, perfect accuracy, better than any tech company could ever build into their social media feed, for giving precisely what’s needed, whatever it is that inevitably has to emerge. A perfectly calibrated experiential feed. How else could it be? How could anything arise that wasn’t “meant” to?

When the point hits home, it marks a significant and subversive shift in perspective.

My bias

A brief note on a bias that I’m aware of within myself:

I fundamentally don’t care about finding ways to quantify qualitative data. I’m much more interested in finding ways to qualify quantitative data.

I have a Ph.D. and a master’s degree, and I’m a college vice president, and I’m obliged to work with and think in terms of numbers every day. But the data that drive me in our current culture of the “data-driven” imperative are humanistic, philosophical, spiritual, and meaning-based. Enough with numbers and the obsession with them. What’s important is the human stories and existential realities these numbers abstractly represent.

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How Ray Bradbury’s ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ haunted my youth

Cover of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes – the edition I read at thirteen

Today at Facebook I came across a post that’s amazingly effective at conveying both the plot and the emotional impact of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which came for me—as it has for so many people—at a crucially vulnerable and susceptible point in my life, when I was the same age as Will and Jim in the story (13 years old). The FB post is from an account that goes by the title “Classic Literature.” And though I suspect it may have been written or at least assisted by AI, I still find it distinctly effective at articulating the darkly autumnal appeal of a novel whose importance to me I’ve always felt I failed to communicate whenever I have tried to tell people about it.

Here’s the post:

I finished Something Wicked This Way Comes last week, and I swear it’s still following me around like a shadow. You know how some books just… stay with you? This one crawled right into that part of my childhood where I used to lie awake at night, convinced something was watching me from the hallway.

Bradbury tells this story about two thirteen-year-old boys, Will and Jim, living in this perfect small town when a carnival rolls in at three in the morning. But it’s not just any carnival—it’s this twisted, beautiful nightmare where the carousel spins backwards and makes you younger, or forwards and ages you to dust. The carnival master, Mr. Dark, literally wears people’s souls as tattoos on his skin. Can you imagine?

What got to me, though, wasn’t just the horror. It was how Bradbury captures that moment when you’re thirteen and desperate to grow up, but also terrified of losing what you are. I kept thinking about my own childhood, how I used to sneak out at night just to feel brave, and how the world seemed full of both magic and menace. The way he writes about Will’s father, this middle-aged librarian who feels like he’s missed his chance at heroism—God, that broke my heart. There’s this scene where he literally fights the carnival with laughter and love, and I found myself crying because it felt so true.

The book reminded me why October always feels haunted, why carnivals still make me a little nervous, and why growing up is both the most natural and the most terrifying thing we do.

You can read the original at Facebook.

The cover photo I have uploaded is from the exact edition I read as a young teen. I bought the book from one of those book order forms we regularly received in school. I still remember sitting in my junior high/middle school science classroom and reading through that form, and absorbing the description of Bradbury’s book, and feeling magnetically drawn to both the story and the cover. Together they generated a sense of dark magic that the book not only fulfilled but, astonishingly, exceeded when it finally arrived. I had already read some of Bradbury’s work by then, including stories in his classic collections The Illustrated Man and S Is for Space. And I had felt the force of the delicious spell that his stories cast. But Something Wicked elevated that effect to a whole new level, reaching right down into my soul.

Such experiences are few and far between in one’s life. They deserve to be savored. And I have indeed done that, with Bradbury serving as a significant influence on my life and thought.

When reality outweirds fiction

At what point will we no longer need to read weird fiction or watch weird cinema anymore because we can just look out the window, step out the door, watch the news, or introspect for five minutes to encounter everything we always sought from such art and entertainment?

There’s a great deal of strangeness and dread afoot these days as we navigate collectively—and, it seems to me, rather blindly—through a kind of transformational gauntlet across every dimension of life: social, cultural, political, psychological, economic, educational, religious, spiritual, ecological, and even biological. It will be fascinating to see what this all does to art and literature. Or maybe, with the meteoric rise of the weird to an unprecedented level of cultural prominence and centrality in the early twenty-first century, we’re already seeing it.

The real question may be just how truly weird reality will end up becoming. On this note, one can’t help wondering: Would—or will—that quality of weirdness be located only in our subjective experience, in our minds and perspectives, standing as a mere mental interpretation and emotional coloration laid over an objective world that remains unchanged? Or will it also, in the manner peculiar to the very mode or genre of weird storytelling, manifest “out there” in the world, revealing a nondual identification of outer and inner? Will it perhaps take on the guise, role, and unsettling force of the Old English root of our modern word “weird”: wyrd, meaning fate, destiny, and/or a supernatural force that controls both.

More: Has the weird already done this, already alchemized the inner-outer field of our experience, working a fundamental and still-unfolding transmutation upon it, while we simply weren’t paying attention?

Is our current global weirding not an aberration, but an indication, an unveiling, a revelation of a deeper order?

Gloating over violence corrupts us all

A friend has posted the following at Facebook: “Irrespective of how much you dislike someone, gloating over their death is a sign of low-IQ scumbaggery.” He’s talking about the outpouring of glee among some liberal quarters over Charlie Kirk’s murder two days ago. This friend is a die-hard liberal, mind you. And what he’s saying is correct (though I think the form of his criticism, with its harsh name-calling, is not helpful).

The current indulgence, among some people, in selectively condoning or even praising violence based on their political identification reminds me of the same trend two decades ago, back during the George W. Bush era. It was less developed in America then, but at the time, when I was operating under a former (now deleted) Facebook account, I noted with dismay—and I publicly criticized—some of the rhetoric that some self-identified progressive liberals were freely using to invoke violent images and ideas in their tirades against W. I mean things like referring to the French Revolution and guillotines when proclaiming their profound antipathy for Bush and all that he and his administration represented. I got pounced on by a few friends for supposedly not understanding the situation, for minimizing how awful Bush and Republicans were, for downplaying the apocalyptic gravity of the crisis they represented, etc., etc. People tried to tell me that violent language was fully justified by the circumstances.

My response back then was the same as my friend’s response to Kirk’s murder now: Literally and absolutely nothing justifies gloating, joking about, or advocating—whether sarcastically or seriously—political violence. This kind of talk can have nothing but ill effects, whether it’s liberals spouting it toward Trump and Charlie Kirk or conservatives spouting it toward Obama, Biden, and Kamala. And yes, of course, I’m well aware that people on the right end of the political spectrum are quite guilty of it, too.

Such language represents playing with fire. And the fact that the people who indulge in it try to justify it, both morally and on utilitarian grounds (“Somebody has to call out the evil people! Somebody has to stop them!”), and that such an attitude has taken root pretty broadly in some quarters, shows just how far down the rabbit hole of a polluted and corrupted social-political environment and accompanying warped media ecosystem we’ve fallen.

At this point it’s up to each of us, individually, to wake up, examine our conscience, and make responsible choices. Maybe questioning the validity of our own viewpoint and the effect of our inner state on the world we perceive, especially if that viewpoint and state are marked by self-righteousness and an attitude that demonizes and dehumanizes other people, would make a good start.