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Social Media Tells You Who You Are. What if It's Totally Wrong?

Pinterest and Threads seem convinced I’m in my 60s or going through menopause. Spend enough time in the bizarro worlds of these feeds, and you can start to believe anything.

So in this new era of artificial intelligence—when machines can perceive and understand the world, when a chatbot presents itself as uncannily human, when trillion-dollar tech companies use powerful AI systems to boost their ad revenue—surely those recommendation engines are getting smarter, too. Just now, opening the mobile app, I’m seeing posts about perimenopause; women in their forties struggling to shrink their midsections, regulate their nervous systems, or medicate for late-onset ADHD; husbands hiring escorts; and Ali Wong’s latest standup bit about divorce. Back in 1999 the author-programmer Ellen Ullman wrote an essay for WIRED titled “ The Myth of Order,” about the FUD surrounding Y2K, but mostly about how the (ultimately non-disastrous) event revealed some software systems to be little more than new wrappers applied to old jalopies.

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