I acquiesce to it, mind. My wife turned off the garbage-feeding feature when it stopped giving her weather updates. I couldn't figure out how to do this so I turned off my wi-fi entirely, but eventually I gave in. The allure, you see, is the chance to be a two-year-old child again. I get to tell this dumb machine "no" and "no" and "no" again, and it doesn't listen perfectly or well but it does to an extent listen. After a month of telling it I wanted to see nothing but today's Nancy strip it has reached a point where it will reliably give me today's Nancy strip at the top of my feed.
It still gives me other things, of course, and most of these things are junk. But there's enough of the illusion of progress, enough things of genuine interest to me, that I stick with it. That's how they get you.
It's somewhat liberating to not be able to explain. Any of the things I say "no" to I could go off at great length about why I reject them, but the machine doesn't know how to understand that. I can tell it I don't like the topic, or that I don't like the source, and that's it. And it will keep trying and trying to give me things I will like, in the meantime keeping me steadily supplied with a wide range of things to object to.
The machine thinks I have certain interests. It thinks I am interested in, for instance, classical music, probably because of all the time I spend listening to classical music, and it also apparently believes - and this is utterly disingenuous of it - that I am interested in suicide prevention.
And I get so, so much garbage related to classical music. I know next to nothing about classical music, but quite a bit about garbage. The classical music discipline, along with for instance 4X gaming (another thing I enjoy), is positively infested with Nazis and their apologists. Half of the stuff I see are old white men positively livid that someone, somewhere, is looking at Handel through a queer lens, and probably getting a grant for it too. Handel, they will angrily snarl at you, in refutation of a claim made by nobody, wasn't queer! And the other half is lengthy articles for Catholic conservative magazines, the sort who will promote to their dying breath next week the mission of Pope Benedict, which, for some reason, they think is in direct opposition to the mission of Pope Francis. These include articles, no doubt written without something so low as pecuniary motivations, about how Stravinsky is in truth a conservative hero. Why, he was so great he might even have been Catholic!
For some reason all the defenders of the classical canon against queerification never seem to object to these sorts of articles.
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