The Ravens Nest

A Savage Journey Into The Blackened Heart of The Algorithm

The Audience. Great fuck, what a terrible thing that is!

Your success now rewarded or punished by a goddamn computer.

Fuck the arguments around A.I., I’m not worried about that shit, you better get your head on straight or you are doomed and you will doom us all.

The Algorithm.

I shouldn’t capitalize its name.

It deserves mockery, not reverence.

There is nothing in this world more evil, depraved and hell-bent on weaponizing our interests against us than the algorithm.

The thing has us running and chasing that next dopamine hit like addicts going behind a 7-11 in a sketch part of town in the middle of the night.

This was predicted thirty years ago this year.

KMFDM – Dogma. 1996.

Back then, she claimed, “Someone’s writing down your mistakes. Someone’s documenting your downfall.” We looked outward but never toward a mirror.

We shall pay dearly for that!

The question I never directly posed in “Noted. Moving On.” was “If you hypothetically had no audience, would you still write?”

That is a question that a journal answers.

Then it asks another.

Who are you really writing for?

This is a loaded question and everyone here knows it.

Settling on a question of why you write is always comforting but you feel like the rube for skirting that question. It haunts you night and day until it’s answered and you can’t numb that one out. Eventually, it wants to know one thing and it’s the volume of being against the barrier at a metal show when the band builds to that loud as fuck crescendo until it becomes impossible to ignore.

What. Do YOU. Want?

It remains unanswered…for now…like voicemails from someone you don’t want to talk to at the moment, or ever.

Writers! I regret to bring you the god-awful news that the bastards have seen to it that we don’t need to be overly-surveilled when we were presented with the dirty little beast called the algorithm so that all, great and small shall not, save for being marked by that fucking thing, to be safe for consumption.

Like being deemed safe for rampant tuberculosis, how precious.

Oh how lucky we are! Yes the doomed will run full-tilt at the beast and what a thing it is now. It’s truly worse than I described it. Upon entry it reeks of cheap beer, stale incense, deadlines like old tombstones, failed ambitions and cheap thrills. I’ve been there. Staring through the open doorway of it.

Don’t follow me in there, goddammit! I’m going into the heart of this fucking swine and there’s not enough cannabis or mead enough to get us all out alive.

It’s 2:00 am. The hour grows late and Louisiana sits next to me sleeping while the Hellscape outside offers it’s own brand of noise. Meanwhile, The Great Digitized Deity hums in my walls.

The algorithm is a beast straight out of a dystopian nightmare. It selects winners and losers. If it were a person, would you invite this fucking thing over for dinner? Would you excuse the transgressions it causes?

Ah, but you already do!

My contempt for the thing is reaching hate group levels and the only thing stopping me from forming a hate group against algorithms is that someone would order a purity spiral like you’d order a side of The Spanish Inquisition only to express genuine surprise that it actually arrived.

Your own hatred of the thing should match.

Never let it be said that the digital serfdom ever stood up to any company save for maybe one in the past few years?

And then the Intellectual Stenographers came in right behind them for defense.

Fact: We are scraping the hell out of our hides for a scrap of relevance. We are shaving our souls into deli-thin slices for a fucking digital woodchipper and we are being thrown right into the maw of this fucking nightmare without recourse.

The algorithm lobotomizes us all and can be re-written in order to target and eliminate or just bury anyone it likes. It is merciless, hungry and deserves nothing but sheets of Woodstock’s infamous Purple Acid. Perhaps that could provide some entertainment for a change.

Every morning the sun comes up like a diseased orange over this suburb. We’re all on the edge of a paywall, fueled by caffeine and a creeping sense of dread.

We watch Content Creators sharpen blades for the morning slaughter.

It’s foul business, this Great Audience Hunt.

Who IS your work truly for?

Who is the Nocturneverse for?

Everyone…but not just anyone. It is not a cartoon. It is a world as familiar as any you’ve ever imagined. Hope costs. Readers come to it and they see the adventure. They see the monsters. They see things that lurk behind a veiled existence. Some will see so much more than that. Others will find something more suited to their tastes. Then, there are the others. They came. They read. They’re playing. One day, they’ll post and we’ll be there for it. Still, I’m alright if you come in and see that some of the greatest and most noble acts that allowed our world to continue, those moments of profound sacrifice will die as they lived; in the dark.

That is fine if that’s the arrangement.

That is how it truly should be.

Let the story of a supernatural battle between forces both fair and foul, both in the shadows and even out in the open, succeed or fail on it’s own.

We do what we must, where we can, when we can and with what we have.

Some of us are still shaking the algorithm desperately like it’s a vending machine screaming “give us this day our engagement metrics!” We’re like crack-addicted Spidermonkeys with hunting knives clutched in our jaw’s mighty grasp.

The mere act of writing on it’s own was supposed to be rebellion and I want the names of the bastards who turned this shit into a goddamn job interview!

Damn your sponsors and advertisers, look at what they did to Cable and now they’ve come for The internet and The Enshittification Apocalypse Is Well Underway!

Some are tempted right now to rush into the comments to tell me how grateful I’m supposed to be. Yes, noted. Selah.

The Hideous Binary Digital Deity thrives on this. Drama, completely caffeinated roaring diatribes on the internet.

Make no mistake, some earn, I get it. Congratulations but that doesn’t change a fucking thing.

The Internet is not, has never been and probably shall never be about permanence and you should understand that.

What I am talking about should be deeply philosophical, intensely personal. The audience isn’t something you capture in a jar like a firefly.

It shows up without warning.

Often without fanfare.

Just one at a time.

Sometimes over very long stretches of time.

It shows up when they see writing and not a goddamn production. Call it what it is: Turd Polished to mirror finish. Glossy…and it still smells like shit. Someone wasted effort on that.

The way to kill that thing is to fucking defy it. Starve it. Dig deep like you’ve never dug before. Read that author. Buy that book. Dig for new and old sites. Cut up old magazines and make a collage.

Whatever exercise you take on, do it entirely offline. No pictures. Don’t even show it to me.

It needs to be something that you can truly be proud of and then decide to do something even better the next time.

Because The Audience isn’t a reader. It’s a hideous fucking beast with a thousand eyes and a bottomless hunger for content.

Feed it, or it eats you alive.

The trick is never to feed it. Even if you already have been, cut that fucker off now. Starve the swine. Burn that damned page when it’s done. If something survives the fire, then maybe…just maybe…you let it see daylight. Not because The Great Binary Code God deserves it, but because You Do.

The algorithm wants obedience.

Writing demands defiance.

Silence doesn’t give likes but if you want clarity, you’ll get that all day long.

The Machine can’t monetize closed doors.

It also can’t manipulate you.

Write like no one is watching.

Because most days, no one is.

Let that sink in.

For Hunter. Man, Myth, And Legend.