What We Want: Recommendations, Desire and the Two Masters

You pick up your phone to check the time and, twenty minutes later, you are watching something you did not know existed. No one told you to. It was one suggestion, then another, then another.

This is not always bad. Many suggestions are good: a song you loved, a video that taught you something. The question of this essay is calmer than "who is controlling me?" It is this: when what is offered to me is made to measure, what happens to what I want? And what does Jesus have to say to someone asking that?

Where wanting begins

No one invents their desires from scratch. We learn to want by watching family, friends, advertising, shop windows. The philosopher René Girard, since the 1960s, has argued that much of our desire is learned this way, by watching what others desire. It is a debated thesis, but it fits common experience: we start wanting what we see everyone else wanting.

None of this is new. What has changed is the scale and the measuring. Today the shop window is different for each person and adjusts with every tap. A recommendation system learns from what you watch, buy and do not skip, and offers more of the same, or of what resembles it. Little by little, the window can become a mirror.

That calls for care with two exaggerations. One says "the algorithm decides everything for you." The other says "it is just a help and changes nothing." Both speak with too much certainty.

What research shows, and what it does not

A few solid facts, with their limits:

• Attention is limited. The economist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971 that an abundance of information creates a poverty of attention: the more things compete for the eye, the scarcer and more valuable attention becomes. It holds for old newspapers and for today's screens.
• Taste narrows over time, and not always because of recommendations. Tien Nguyen and colleagues, in 2014, followed users of a movie recommendation site (MovieLens) over several years. Almost everyone's range of films grew slightly narrower with time. But the surprise was elsewhere: those who followed the suggestions narrowed less than those who ignored them. The authors suggest that narrowing is partly the natural path of people getting to know their own taste. It is one site, about movies, and one kind of system.
• A closed loop can make people more alike. In 2018, Allison Chaney and colleagues ran computer simulations. When a system learns from choices it has itself prompted, the behavior of the simulated users grows more alike, with no real gain in benefit for them. It is a simulation, with imaginary people, not a measure of real life.
• The environment influences, but little by little. The 2014 Facebook experiment (Kramer and colleagues), the "dark patterns" of online stores and data surveillance are already discussed in the essay on free will. They show that the environment weighs, not that anyone is steered like a puppet.

What research still debates is the size of the effect on each person. And no one can measure from outside what goes on inside you. Only you can notice that, by looking at your own day.

Two masters: what Jesus said

Here the text comes in.

What the text says

Matthew 6:24 is part of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), in which Jesus teaches his disciples with a crowd listening. Before it, in verses 19 to 23, Jesus speaks of treasure: do not store up treasure where moth and rust destroy and thieves steal, but with God. He also speaks of the eye as the lamp of the body. Then comes the line: no one can serve two masters. Either one will hate the one and love the other, or hold to one and despise the other. And Jesus names the two: God and money, in Aramaic, Mammon (a word for wealth and possessions). Luke 16:13 keeps the same saying in another moment of Jesus' teaching.

What it means

"Master," there, is the owner of a slave. A slave belonged wholly to one owner: you can work for many, but you cannot belong to two. "Hate" and "love" are words of strong contrast, in the speech of the time: they mean choosing one in place of the other, loyalty, not anger. The thread joining the verses is the heart: where the treasure is, the heart goes (6:21). And the word translated "good" eye also means simple, whole, undivided (the image is read in more than one way). So Jesus is speaking of a life with a single center.

The text speaks of money. It does not speak of screens, recommendations or social networks.

What changes in life

What follows is an application, said as an application. If the point is what rules my day, Jesus' question fits other things too. The center of a life can be money, a public image, a screen. A suggestion that decides for me, that holds me and never lets me reach an end, is only one of the forms a "master" can take. For those who read with faith, this can become a prayer question: what has been giving orders to my day? Jesus does not tell anyone to feel guilty. He invites us to look at where the heart is learning to live.

Birds and lilies: looking another way

The same chapter goes on: "do not be anxious" (Matthew 6:25). Jesus speaks of food, drink and clothing, the worries of people living at the edge. And he proposes looking at the birds of the sky and the lilies of the field (6:26–29): God cares for them, and you are worth more than they. Verse 33 points to the center: seek first God's kingdom and his justice, and these other things will be given as well. And it closes with a serene realism: each day already has its own troubles (6:34).

Notice that Jesus does not say "stop wanting." He invites us to look. And what we see changes what we want. Someone who spends the day looking at shop windows learns to want what the window shows. Someone who stops now and then before a bird, a sky, a person, learns something else. The application is simple: what shaped our will can be reshaped by a longer look.

The text also does not promise an easy life. It speaks of trust in God, not of the absence of problems. Anyone living between bills and deadlines knows this is no trick.

A small step

You do not have to throw your phone away, or think of yourself as deceived. A few possible steps, only if they make sense to you:

• Before opening a video or a store, ask: "do I want this, or was it offered to me?" Without judging the answer.
• Look on purpose for something the system would not suggest: a book on a shelf, a conversation, a passage of the Sermon on the Mount read from start to finish.
• Pick a time of day without a screen, to look out the window.
• Read Matthew 6:19–34 slowly, on a calm day, and notice what catches your attention.

And if tomorrow it does not work out, that is fine. The choice can be taken up again. The question that remains is a gentle one: what, today, deserves my gaze?

Readings

• Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5 to 7, and Luke 16:13.
• GIRARD, René. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Grasset, 1961 (English: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel).
• SIMON, Herbert A. "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World". In: GREENBERGER, M. (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.
• NGUYEN, Tien T. et al. "Exploring the Filter Bubble: The Effect of Using Recommender Systems on Content Diversity". WWW '14, 2014.
• CHANEY, Allison J. B.; STEWART, Brandon M.; ENGELHARDT, Barbara E. "How Algorithmic Confounding in Recommendation Systems Increases Homogeneity and Decreases Utility". RecSys '18, 2018.
• KRAMER, Adam D. I.; GUILLORY, Jamie E.; HANCOCK, Jeffrey T. "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks". PNAS, 111(24), 2014.