Can You Go a Week Without Algorithms?

Life without algorithms may sound straightforward. To many, algorithms aren’t important things – just bits of code ticking away in the background that maybe point us towards new boxsets that’d suit us, and other suggestions. However, algorithm reliance is a very real thing. Many of us don’t realise how heavily embedded algorithms are in our daily lives, and they are very much running throughout the tech we can’t live without.

The impact of algorithms on daily life are everywhere. You wake up and brush your teeth – the music playing in the background, and (crucially) with it the adverts between songs, is catered for you based off your tastes and skipping history. You go downstairs and whip up some breakfast – unknowingly putting together the healthy option a fitness influencer reel put together on Instagram the other day, something that put you that way because of your recent interest in diets and weight-losing tips. It goes further, your choices in car, holiday, boxset, movie, financial products – everything is curated and manipulated by the algorithms around us. The designers of algorithms will argue this is simply creating a more efficient and intuitive world around us. But what happens without algorithms?

To find out, I decided to go a week without algorithms. The algorithm detox is becoming increasingly popular, where people decided to find out how much of their free will they still have in seven days without algorithms. This is how I got on.

The algorithm detox

On Monday morning I started by going through all my apps and accounts – Spotify, Prime, Netflix, X, Instagram – and disabling these settings and algorithms. Cookies were disabled. Newsfeeds were reset. I immediately saw a difference in my social media.

For one, I was seeing a lot less of subject matter that – for lack of a better word – triggered me. I hadn’t changed who I followed, but I was immediately seeing less about politics, climate change, crime etc. My newsfeed was simpler, less outrageous. A bit boring, even. However, I shouldn’t have been surprised – recent research by UCL/Kent found some major social media platforms had been pushing harmful content to younger followers. Though I’m not the target audience for this, as I’m in my thirties, I was still susceptible to how algorithms would try and push extraordinary content my way to illicit a response.

Without algorithms, social media became a very different part of my life. It wasn’t the source of distraction it used to be, and this was largely because it was – well – ordinary. A lot of the content was of no interest to me, or didn’t inspire a response at all. It felt more organic and reminded me of when I first got onto social media and it was more mundane, normal and scruffy.

I noticed further changes that night. Sitting down to watch Netflix and Prime, it took me a while to find anything to watch. And for the first time I was truly struck by just how much content is on platforms like these, but algorithms make me only see a small and heavily curated part of this. Taking this algorithm challenge seriously, I just went for something in the ‘top 10 watched’ section and ended up enjoying a historical drama I’d never usually watch. So far so good.

As the week went on, I also noticed I was reading different news. As a writer, I have to read a lot of the news, and I was faced with newsletters and notifications I couldn’t remember signing up to. The news became very standard and formulaic again – I found myself having to go looking for it, and on Wednesday I even just watched the standard evening news on the BBC. This is because many major news corporations heavily rely on algorithms to dispense their news, pushing out the content they know will illicit the most engagement. This also came through in the adverts I was facing. Very little that I saw resonated with me, and even when I made online purchases I wasn’t harangued by follow up adverts that suggested I make similar or adjacent purchases. I ended the week spending less…

Going a week without algorithms didn’t just save me money but crucially saved me time. Whenever working or maybe waiting for the kettle to boil, I’ll absent mindedly find myself picking my phone up. A 10 second scroll can quickly turn into a 10 minute scroll as I’ll see other videos, posts and content that algorithms have pushed me way. These little delays all add up, eating into my productivity and filling my head with what is essentially nonsense. Do I need to see what some Z-list celebrity said on a recent podcast? Does it really matter what some meme about politics is pointing out? This is all digital nonsense which, after a week, I didn’t find myself missing.

Algorithm withdrawal

The influence of algorithms was clear. It was something I had to get used to – I found myself taking longer to find the content I wanted to consume, to search for products to buy and so forth. I had become accustomed to algorithms curating a very convenient and efficient world for me. In that respect, it was tricky getting used to this which was surprising.

On the positives, I was able to reconnect offline better in how I went about my day, focused more on my work and essentially was glued to my phone a lot less. I soon didn’t miss the noise and nonsense my device filled my head with, and my attention span improved. This led to better enjoyment of time with my friends and family, and analogue activities like reading books and exercising.

Time away from technology can be crucial and this is especially important given AI is becoming more prevalent in our day-to-day lives. Re-evaluating technology use was important for me and made me realise that my digital wellbeing could be improved just by thinking for myself more and conceding less control to technology.