Digital serendipia is in danger of extinction. Internet understands us too well

Serendipia, that valuable finding that happens while we were looking for something else, It is in the process of extinction if we talk about the Internet. The increasingly precise recommendation algorithms have locked us in bubbles of very comfortable convenience, but also sterile. We no longer lose ourselves on the Internet – from there the “navigate” -. And that is the problem.

I think of my adolescence, in the first decade of this century. An any night, listening to Rock & Gol, who combined rock and football, wanted to hear comments on that glorious stage of Valencia, but suddenly something different sounded. It was not the commercial pop of melancholic latest adalescents (“I loved it so much …!”), Nor the first Reggaeton that we met. Was ‘E-Pro’, from Beck.

Those four minutes changed my perception of what music could be. Today I do not seem to me from the other Thursday, but at that time it made me want to hear a type of music that until then did I know. It was an accident, a fortuitous collision with something that I had never actively looked for because I didn’t even know that it existed. He simply reached my ears without ever having reproduced anything similar.

Today, with Spotify suggesting songs millimetrically refined to my tastes – declored and inferred, Grrr – I wonder Where are those transformative accidents for current adolescents.

It is a paradox: the more sophisticated the technology becomes to “meet us”, the less opportunities we have to know something really new. Our algorithms have confused “relevance” with “familiarity”, offering us barely noticeable variations of what we already consume. As Antonio Ortiz said in “Internet was dopamine, AI will be oxytocin“, We have optimized platforms to maintain our attention, not to expand our horizons. Captive, not creative.

When was the last time you discovered something really unexpected in your Feed? Not something tangential to your usual interests, but something totally new, discordant, something that made you rethink ideas and expand towards a new taste.

The digital explorer of yesteryear, which sailed hyperlink in hyperlink to the final P2P, has been replaced by the passive consumer that slides the finger in an infinite flow of pre -healing content. In its improvement, The algorithms have eliminated friction, and with it, the generative spark of the disagreement. It is not good news.

The horny is that this algorithmic refinement comes just when we need divergent thinking. The real innovation, which changes paradigms instead of optimizing the existing, arises precisely from unexpected connections, from the collision between disparate ideas. Silicon Valley was built on serendipias: Stewart Brand finding inspiration in the native Americans to create the Whole Earth CatalogSteve Jobs captivated by calligraphy which would end up deeply influencing the design and DNA of the Mac. Until the very concept of hypertext he was born from an analogy with how the human mind works: not linearly, but by unexpected associations.

It is not just a matter of innovation. Also of civic health. Before, physical newspapers forced us to pass pages where we found, unintentionally, discordant opinions with ours. Now Discover is in charge of filtering.

Now, ours feeds They are so Tunis that can spend months without giving ourselves with an idea that really confront our convictions. The algorithm, in its eagerness to maximize our permanence time, serves only what confirms our presuppositions. Or in the case of X, What will make us foam through our mouths.

This overallization of digital consumption has created a strange phenomenon: we had never had access to so much information and yet our mental worlds are increasingly narrow. The variety has been sacrificed at the altar of personalized experience. It is still symptomatic that some of the most powerful voices after these designs They do not want to put their own creations in the hands of their children.

We go to an internet where each click It is premeditated, where the following recommendation is predictably interesting. In the name of efficiency we are sacrificing that glorious digital disorder That, like garbage DNA in our genome, could contain the germ of the next great innovation or simply those findings that change the cultural consumption of the rest of our life.

I wonder how many songs of Beck – not songs by the Californian musician, but the concept of music that breaks with our previous beliefs – we are missing, especially today’s teenagers, trapped in loops of algorithmically perfectly perfectly sterile content.

Maybe it’s time for demand the right to digital serendipia. To ask ourselves if we want an internet that understands us too well or one that may still surprise us.

In Xataka | Shy from the world, we are losing the Internet

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