The Mechanisms of “AlgoWave”

Leigh Alexander’s “The Soft Truth” captures a precise and extremely contemporary image. It follows a character who has been placed in 3 precarious positions: fired from her job as an researcher of executives, sighting a doppelganger of her “other self”, and desperate to find the source of a thumbnail in her YouTube recommended videos. What ensues is a psychologically disorienting quest to satisfy the compelling forces of an addiction created by algorithmically suggested content. Hence the genre tag AlgoWave. Characterized, in my mind, by the revealing of habitual plasticity that is brought to light by the hidden mechanisms we interact with everyday. And don’t forget the hallucinatory manifestations of your past cyber-interactions coming to haunt you, Ala “Serial Experiments Lain”. This story relies heavily on nuance and brief environmental storytelling (e.g. the absurd political advertisements sprinkled throughout).

As for an interpretation of the ending, the meeting of the protagonist and her “other self”, capped off with the satisfying destruction of a gelatin sphere. The doppelganger seems to be a digital identity constructed by the algorithms that have led her to this point. I interpret the comforting of the doppelganger as a kind of harbinger of what is to come along her digital path, since she does finally find the video she is looking for afterwards. The role of the gelatin sphere video is rather hopeful, as she is ultimately quenched by the agency of her own sleuthing rather than relying upon the mercy of the algorithm to provide.

I believe that AlgoWave is about much more than vague technological commentary. I think it is about the latent anxieties of a possibly deterministic existence that plagues the minds of many people today. AlgoWave pretty much satirizes the fear that free will might not be real.

The original story being discussed: https://medium.com/s/story/the-soft-truth-b7c8639031f2