Machine learning gets a lot of bad press. A friend recently lamented that her social media feed had become an unrelenting procession of death, famine, war, and then somehow more death. Which, without question, would be a gigantic bummer. Hard to build any momentum in your day when the opening act is human suffering followed by a brief moment of disturbing intrigue and then additional human suffering.
And yet somehow, in my own extensive and deeply concerning doom scrolling—as confirmed by my iPhone’s weekly Screen Time report, which now arrives with the moral authority of a disappointed guidance counsellor—I appear to have trained the algorithm into something resembling emotional support.
My feed has settled into a perfect equilibrium of Jonny Devaney, puppies, aquarium stories (specifically octopuses), glamping, and crow content.
First, know that the chances of my glamping are very low. I am still living down the time I escaped from the tent in the backyard with my girlfriends and relocated myself to my own bed beside my husband around 2:00 a.m. One minute I was committed to the experience, and the next I was under a duvet in a climate-controlled environment wondering why I had voluntarily chosen to sleep on the ground. Worse, it was my idea in the first place.
Sheesh.
Second, at the first available opportunity, I would like to make friends with a crow.
This is apparently not as far-fetched as it sounds. Crows operate on a kind of informal barter system absent any commonly recognized currency. You leave them small objects—shiny things, bits of foil, coins—just enough to establish that you have enough personal worth to maintain ongoing relations. Frankly, the crows may have a more stable economy than we do. If they decide you are worthy, or at least sufficiently consistent, they may begin to leave things for you in return.
Not because they have to.
Because they noticed you.
It was somewhere in the middle of all this crow research that I realized I had effectively been in a crow-based relationship for years. My husband had been performing a version of this exact ritual for quite some time.
A creature of habit, he returns from his Saturday morning tour of the neighbourhood. Instead of sitting in a tree judging the neighbours—which, come to think of it, does sound entertaining—he spends the morning consuming his news analog style.
Every so often he will appear holding a carefully torn newspaper column. Slightly uneven at the edges, folded once, sometimes twice, and presented without commentary. Conveniently left where I will happen across it during my day.
Vinay Menon is the byline.
I receive it with the enthusiasm of someone being handed flowers. Or chocolate. Or even a small, meaningful piece of jewelry. Sometimes greedily reading it right away, other times I will save it for later as a special treat.
As I’ve been reading Vinay’s pieces quietly over the years, something shifted. I had always respected his writing. Everyone does. But somewhere along the way, I began to wonder—not dramatically, not even consciously—if I could occupy the same space. Not his space exactly. I don’t claim the ability to spill the global tea as it were—and be careful because it’s hawt! —but that space, a third cousin once removed.
It wasn’t ambition. Not really.
More like a distant aspiration.
Meanwhile, the algorithm kept feeding me crows. Machine learning, at its core, is simply pattern recognition. It observes what you linger on. What you return to. What you accept when it is offered.
My husband, it seems, had been doing the same thing.
Leaving small objects.
Proof of attention. A source of inspiration.
All this time, I thought I was just reading.
Apparently, I was being read.
Which is both deeply affirming and mildly unsettling, but I don’t have time to fully examine that right now because I have to go walk Sunny the Wonder Dog, who, unlike the crows, requires no ritual objects whatsoever. Only that I respect her strict schedule. And snacks. And constant reassurance that she is, in fact, the center of the known universe.
She’s not wrong.