Orphaned Curiosities

I don’t love climbing videos. I don’t care about AI get-rich-quick schemes. But I stopped for two seconds on an open-source project about synthesizing voices locally. Apparently that was enough to feed the feed.

A flood of Gen Z teenagers taking off their glasses and pulling at their hair like the most insane shit just happened. I can almost hear them saying, “You’re not gonna believe what I’m about to tell you.”

Tap, tap, tap. On Claude. Tap, tap, tap. Use this connector to make, tap, tap, tap, a thousand dollars in, tap, tap, tap, two days. The cheap plastic pen cap punching their screen. Wielding the Bluetooth mic mounted on a spatula.

I feel invisible to the feed, completely misunderstood by it.

And it slotted me straight into an entire personality. A full commercial-interest workup. A rigid consumer profile, and all the predictions that come with it about what I want next.

I’d love to be understood. I want to be recognized. I yearn for someone or something to identify this strange accumulation of experiences, strengths and weaknesses that belong to me.

Most of all, I want whatever achieves this to make me feel appreciated for being precisely that.

I’ve always been a sucker for personality tests. It has been like this ever since I read my own horoscope. Give me a spectrum, put me up against it, hand me a label at the end. Whatever it says, I’ll find some reason to be proud of it.

The strange thing is how private that pride is. I could read an intentionally vague sentence and feel recognised. I could find a source inside me that resonated with the words on the page. But then I tell someone out loud, “Apparently I’m this thing,” and it almost immediately becomes silly. I’m a lion. A category of twelve. Like having a little lion badge pinned on my head can explain who I am?

With a horoscope, the recognition lasts only a few seconds. Almost instantly, I reach the edge of what a line can explain about me.

With the new systems, sometimes I can’t tell where the edge is.

The underlying mechanism isn’t necessarily different. The difference is whether the system arrives at a conclusion about who I am before I do.

The feed fights my established self-image. But the systems that answer back are constructing an image I don’t yet have. Something that starts to feel uncannily like me.

Words I’ve wanted to use to describe myself, but did not yet possess.

A thought I had yesterday. Something that eluded me last month. A question from a year ago that I forgot to ask again. Ideas I filed away and left sitting somewhere inside me.

The idea of turning swipes on a keyboard into art. The love of time-lapse videos, combined with the internet’s history. These have materialized as the latest two experiments on Project Nothing.

A system that can reach in, pull those fragments out, and lay them down beside each other connects them in ways I never have.

Once I feel that happen, I want more.

I start bringing it pieces of myself that do not yet have homes. The lost pieces. The ones I’ve struggled to incorporate, and have never found a way to interlock with who I am now.

These forgotten fragments might have faded, but now they are burning brightly enough for me to follow them somewhere new.

Their placement doesn’t even have to be right.

Once I see these fragments connect to who I think I am, even oddly, I have something to react to. Maybe it is exactly the connection I would have made myself. Sometimes several fragments pull together, things that separately never seemed like parts of me, and suddenly I can see that they can belong together.

That feels enormously valuable.

But there is another side to it.

Previously, these fragments could stay loose for months or years. I would carry them around like a stack of stones in a backpack, occasionally pulling one out and thinking, “Ah, this one could be gold.” Or pulling two out and banging them together like a Neanderthal, hoping that they’ll fit.

Sometimes they got too heavy and I had to let them go. Sometimes they fell out of the bag and I lost them.

The reason for carrying them was the hope of finding how they would fit together.

Every time the system assembles these pieces for me, I see the possibility sooner, but I lose the chance to be first.

There’s no way to inventory what I’ve lost.

Maybe I would have arrived at something far better. Or perhaps I would have spent another five years carrying the same stones around in my backpack, paving my own history with orphaned curiosities.

From otherwise lost fragments, this system can manufacture possibilities novel for me, close enough to reach.

As these possibilities come within reach, they start becoming extensions of me.

I can’t return to the version of myself that had never known them.

This is the payment.

I will never be the first to connect these pieces of my curiosity.