First Monday @ 30
2026-01-06
Announcements
Current Issue
Volume 31, Number 4 - 6 April 2026
Published:
2026-04-07
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This month: April 2026 Algorithmic folk theories: Content creators’ understandings of TikTok’s algorithms Twenty TikTok content creators were interviewed, representing historically disempowered social groups to discuss their experiences with TikTok’s algorithms. The participants identified consistency in how the platform’s algorithms responded to the visible identities of the creators and to discussion of social justice-related topics. They also described the relationships that they saw between these practices and TikTok’s economic incentives, providing strategies that they employed for navigating algorithmic systems. |
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Also this month Lying to the machine This essay examines a small but revealing practice: the manipulation of fitness devices to register activity that did not occur. Cases in which the lie serves an obvious external purpose — social clout, professional advancement, monetary reward — are excluded. The focus is on something stranger: lying about oneself, mainly to oneself, for no apparent gain. That narrow act turns out to sit at the intersection of three larger phenomena. First, a body of work in self-deception psychology asks why people persist in beliefs they know to be false, and what role technology plays in sustaining those beliefs. Second, scholarship on gamification and surveillance capitalism reveals the systems into which fitness data flows once it leaves the wristband (e.g., insurance platforms, employer wellness programmes, and public health databases) and the ways in which the data’s integrity is silently assumed by the algorithms that act on it. Third, resistance theory offers a framework for reading the same act not as irrational self-sabotage but as a refusal to let gamified systems define the terms on which a person’s relationship to their own body is measured. Lying to fitness machines is a culturally revealing practice, one that exposes the tensions between self-knowledge and self-presentation, between user autonomy and the data imperatives of gamified systems, and between everyday resistance and the structures of auto-exploitation that shape our digital lives. |
