YOU MUST FEED THE FEED
Context, Reaction, and the Architecture of Misreading
I posted a photo of myself standing in front of a house somewhere outside Los Angeles that had been fully converted into a shrine to the most fever-dream riddled corners of contemporary American right wing politics. “Keep Christ in Christmas.” “Trump + JFK Jr. 2024.” “Elon Bring DOGE to California.” The works. In the photo, I’m grinning awkwardly, giving a thumbs up. Mustache, tattoos, flipped brim. I’m looking like an absolute dolt as I’m about to head out in a trail run in the hills outside of Monrovia. I posted the photo below. This is from Threads.
As I was posting this, I didn’t think it was subtle or satirical. I certainly did not experience it as a calculated provocation. It struck me as obviously absurd — the kind of image you share because the situation itself is ridiculous, not because you’re trying to smuggle in a message. There wasn’t a strategy behind it. There wasn’t even really a joke. It felt self-evidently silly.
I went to bed.
When I woke up, there were nearly a thousand replies calling me a fascist, a pedophile, a propagandist, and suggesting in various creative ways that I kill myself.
A handful of people tried to defend me by explaining that it was satire. That, somehow, felt almost as disorienting as the attacks. It wasn’t satire, at least not as I understand that word. Satire implies intention, a target, a kind of crafted misdirection. I wasn’t trying to expose anything or trick anyone. I was doing something that doesn’t have a clean name: noticing out loud. Pointing at absurdity without redirecting it. Standing in front of something ridiculous and letting that speak for itself.
What unsettled me wasn’t the hostility. People have always yelled on the internet — and I was an early adopter. I’ve been getting in digital screaming matches in IRC chat rooms and on BBS boards since the 90s.
What unsettled me was how quickly the image was sorted into one of three interpretive boxes: either I was revealing my sincere allegiance, or I was cynically farming outrage, or I was executing a piece of pointed satire. There didn’t seem to be a category available for “this is just obviously ridiculous.”
It was as if every post must be legible as strategy — sincere extremism, ironic extremism, or instrumental extremism. Even the people trying to give me the benefit of the doubt assumed I was running a play.
I wasn’t running a play. But I’ve been sitting with the uncomfortable possibility that this distinction may matter less and less in the environment we now inhabit.
When I suggested that a quick glance at my profile would make the situation clearer, several people told me it was “insane” to expect that kind of effort from readers. That word lodged itself in my mind. Insane. To expect someone to check context before publicly condemning them.
Maybe I’m carrying forward a communicative norm that no longer holds. I’ve tended to assume that if something strikes me as extreme or anomalous, it’s worth a few seconds of investigation. Is this consistent with the person’s broader pattern? Is this parody? Is this an outlier? That has always felt, to me, like minimal interpretive responsibility.
This is where I confront my own interpretive biases — as I need to be honest about what that click actually costs, because I think I was too quick to frame it as effortless. We’re not talking about follower-based feeds anymore, where you’ve curated your own information environment and context travels with the content.
Algorithmic feeds work differently. They’re designed to hold your attention inside the feed itself — every departure is friction, every click away is a small tax you pay against the flow. The feed wants your affect. It wants you to feel, react, and stay.
Leaving to check a profile is precisely the kind of behavior the architecture is built to discourage. So when people told me it was insane to expect that effort, I can’t dismiss that entirely as laziness or bad faith. The platform is doing real work to make context feel like a burden. And the deeper problem isn’t just that leaving the feed costs something — it’s that the feed itself has become the entirety of the context.
John Berger, writing about photography in Ways of Seeing, observed that images mean differently depending on what surrounds them. Arrange the same photograph differently on a corkboard — next to this image, or that one, or that caption — and you produce different meanings. The surrounding field becomes the interpretive frame. What Berger was describing as a deliberate, human act of curation has now been automated and scaled. The algorithmic feed functions by the same logic, except that the author of the surrounding context is no longer you. It’s the platform’s model of what will keep you engaged longest.
The feed is a referential totality that teaches you how to read any given post — the mood board you’re drawing on when you encounter my photo — that has been assembled for you, optimized not for accuracy or charity or understanding, but for maximum retention of your attention and affect.
You must feed the feed.
In that environment, my photo didn’t arrive as a post from a person with a history. It arrived as an object inside a context that had been curated around your emotional and behavioral profile — probably surrounded by content that already primed outrage, or suspicion, or tribal sorting. Whatever meaning you brought to my image, you brought from there. The feed was the author. I was just the occasion.
The post is increasingly treated as a self-contained unit of meaning not because readers have become lazy or careless, but because the feed itself has become the context. Context is friction. The burden sits entirely with the poster to eliminate ambiguity before they enter that environment. The reader’s reaction, by contrast, is treated as sovereign.
That last word is the one I keep circling. Sovereign.
It seems to me that feeling has become, in many cases, self-authorizing. If something I encounter produces anger, disgust, or alarm, that feeling is taken as sufficient grounds for response. When I’ve suggested that context might matter, it can sound as though I’m invalidating the feeling itself. But I’ve always thought of feelings as signals rather than conclusions. When something hits me hard, I tend to treat that intensity as information: Why did this land that way? What might I be projecting? What might I be missing? The feeling, in my experience, is the beginning of inquiry, not the end.
What I seem to be encountering more often online is a compressed loop in which feeling moves almost instantly to performance. I feel; I react. The pause — the small space in which interpretation could be revised — feels increasingly optional, or even suspect. Perhaps it has always been this way and I’m only noticing because I was on the receiving end. But from where I’m sitting, the absence of that pause changes the texture of shared life in subtle ways.
I’ve also been thinking about how deeply we’ve internalized the logic of content. When I scroll through feeds now, I catch myself instinctively asking: What’s the angle? Who is this for? What’s the move? That posture isn’t entirely irrational. Platforms are built around engagement, and many posts are, in fact, campaign-coded — optimized for effect, engineered for the reaction they’re designed to produce. But once that lens becomes habitual, it’s easy to start assuming that every human gesture runs the same logic. Ambiguity stops being ambiguity and becomes strategy. A photo in front of a bizarre yard display cannot simply be a moment of absurdity; it must be literal allegiance, cynical bait, or crafted satire.
Our platforms are built to decontextualize. But our human brains still subconsciously insist on authorial intent. In the absence of context, the only thing that feels certain in is our immediate affective response. Everything else is untrustworthy, unknowable, or both.
In that sense, the experience felt like the death of the author in real time. My intent did not stabilize the meaning of the post. My broader body of work did not stabilize it. My history did not stabilize it. I couldn’t even ‘gather’ its meaning after the fact via discursive responses. The image was abstracted and circulated as an object to be processed, judged, and reacted to. Whatever people read into it became, functionally, its meaning. Barthes was describing what happens when a text enters the world. What I experienced was that happening at feed speed, at scale, before I woke up.
I had a moment — the kind where you wonder if you’re simply aging out of a landscape that no longer shares your assumptions — and I sat with it rather than dismissed it. Maybe the communicative norms I carry are artifacts. Maybe the expectation of interpretive charity was always contingent, and those conditions have quietly dissolved. I’m willing to consider that. But I don’t think the shift is trivial, and I don’t think it only affects people like me. When every gesture is pre-sorted as campaign-coded, something changes in what it means to share a world with other people.
What ultimately depressed me wasn’t the volume of outrage. It was the idea that pausing might be unreasonable. That a breath might be too much to ask. If that’s where we are, then we’ve collectively acclimated into a way of inhabiting shared space in which reaction consistently outruns responsibility — and the immediacy of our affective response is the only stable ground we have. That kind of speed feels brittle to me. That foundation feels unstable. A shared world, as I understand it, depends on at least the possibility of revision — on the willingness to discover that we misread something and adjust accordingly.
I’m not above this dynamic. I’ve reacted too quickly. I’ve misinterpreted posts. I’ve been pulled along by the momentum of a feed. But being on the receiving end clarified something for me this time. It showed me how easily people become content for one another, how quickly ambiguity gets flattened, how narrow the space between confusion and condemnation can become.
If nothing else, the episode left me with one small, unfashionable principle: before you condemn someone publicly, click their profile. The platform will punish you for it, marginally — you’ll lose your place in the feed, your streak of frictionless affect will be interrupted. But it’s the minimum viable act of remembering that there is, in fact, a person attached to the post. And that remembering matters — not because it will change the platform, but because it changes what kind of reader you are, what kind of neighbor you’re capable of being in a shared space. The gesture is small. What it preserves is the possibility that the person on the other side of the post is not just content, but a participant in the same world you inhabit.
this is...very NOW
I like your shirt.