Gambling with algorithms

What are we really betting on when we post ourselves online?

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This edition is part of a series called An Algorithmic Becoming. The previous editions asked what we’re running from when we doomscroll. This one explores what we’re running towards when we post.

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“Hey, have you been waiting for a while?”

I looked up to the sound of a familiar voice. It was Devina, my classmate from middle school. I didn’t notice her walking up to me, despite being seated outdoors, facing the streets. Denpasar’s traffic that Sunday evening took over the soundscape of the corner I was inhabiting. Even the music from the coffee shop was drowned out.

Also, I happened to be looking down at my book.

“Not at all,” I said, trying to assure her she wasn’t late. It was I who was early, which was uncharacteristic. I had mistaken our agreed meeting time. We initially set it for 5 PM, but our other friend could only join at 6. By the time I realised there might be confusion there, I was all ready to go out the door. I didn’t bother confirming. A part of me was looking forward to spending time with my book.

We hugged, and she went inside to order. Mine was already out and half-finished.

“What are you reading?” she asked, taking the seat next to me after ordering, joining me as I swatted flies coming for my food and drink. I had placed my book to the side, cover facing down.

“Oh, it’s this book about bankers,” I told her, with a slight hesitation. For a split second, I worried about appearing too nerdy in front of my model friend.

I had picked up the book, along with one other, as the holiday season drew near. My family and I celebrated Eid last month, which fell only a few days apart from Nyepi, or the Day of Silence—it’s a day in the Balinese Hindu calendar where all activities are halted to give time for introspection. That means: no work, no travelling, no entertainment, no lights, and, as I’ve learned this year, no internet.

I ended up finishing the romance novel¹ in between work, and starting the book about the global financial crisis post-World War I during my vacation. In the middle of reading the second book, I thought to myself: I’m really enjoying this combination—romance during work, financial crisis during holidays. To the author’s credit, it’s a brilliant book—Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, written by Liaquat Ahamed. Originally published in 2009, it won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2010.

I’m really enjoying this combination—romance during work, financial crisis during holidays.

Sure, I might be late to it. That’s probably because when it first came out, Devina and I were still in the same classroom, hair braided into two, with red ribbons tied on both ends (school policy). I had no business trying to understand global finance then. One can argue I still don’t. As depicted in the book, it was an elite men’s game. To a great extent, it still is today.

Devina came to Bali for the same reason I get to indulge myself in the book—the Nyepi holidays. She lives in Jakarta now, and hasn’t properly gone back for a few years. She has made a name for herself as a model, having competed in the second season of Cantik Indonesia² when she was 18, and then the first cycle of Indonesia’s Next Top Model³ when she was 23—she made it to the top three for both shows. She still does modelling, and is now trying to break into the world of acting, while making content to an audience of almost 400,000 followers on Instagram and over 300,000 on TikTok. She told me she is in the middle of working on a book.

I asked what the book was about. Women’s empowerment, she said. A lot of her content on her socials touches upon the topic of female agency in a patriarchal society. She runs the occasional rubric where she narrates stories about toxic relationships, videos that could reach over 100,000 views. It has become one of her niche topics.

I am often critical of bite-sized discourse on the internet. But I have to admit, I have a soft spot for this girl. I always have, and probably will always do. I guess it comes from knowing the person behind the persona. This is, after all, the person I trusted to bake a birthday cake for a boyfriend once—Devina started her own bakery when she was in school, and I wanted to try her creation. She has been entrepreneurial for as long as I’ve known her. Does it surprise me that she approaches content creation the same way? Not really.

Our friend Kharisma, an edtech researcher, joined us not long after. I didn’t check the time, but by then we were already deep in discussing audience building, a topic which ended up becoming the main subject of the evening. We moved indoors before we carried on with our conversation, for the air conditioning—the city’s hot and humid. The three of us occupied a corner table close to the exit door.

A model, a writer, and a researcher walk into a cafe. Who’s the odd one out?

I imagine it must’ve felt like hitting the jackpot when your content goes viral for the first time.

At least, that’s what it sounds like. I’ve been listening to my two friends recount how the algorithm has been responding to content they have been posting, which made me wonder: Am I late to this game? Why haven’t I been making any meaningful bets on the algorithm? Should I? Do I want to?

Kharisma started posting on TikTok in 2021. The first video he ever posted was of him canoeing at Sanur Beach with three other friends, which saw 135 views. The second one was another clip of the beach—162. It didn’t take him long to discover what his niche was⁴. People seemed to respond when he talked about his education journey—and it’s a topic he feels strongly about, having been a star pupil throughout his school years. About three months after his first post, he hit virality. 377,000 views, 35,000 likes, 156 comments, and almost 17,000 bookmarks.

The video in question was a 55-second clip of him sharing tips for students who are preparing for their research proposal seminar⁵. His voiceover guided the viewers through a presentation deck he prepared: “Expect the questions,” he says, listing a few in the slides. Why is this research important? Why this theory? Why this methodology? He ended the clip with a gentle reminder—stay calm. The comment section is flooded with thank yous and people tagging their friends.

“I figured nobody was doing this,” he said. The post is now pinned on his page, along with another one of his viral posts, also of the same topic, which garnered over 345,000 views. It seems that the viral posts, pinned, are the digital equivalent of those metallic YouTube plaques YouTubers would often feature on the background of their videos. Everyone can say they’re a content creator, but are you really if you’ve never gone viral?

Kharisma was earnest when he said he started his platform from scratch. He barely had anyone he knew following him on his TikTok page. All 5,000+ followers and 200,000 something likes he had accumulated came from a single distribution channel: the algorithm⁶. Before creating content on TikTok, he had never imagined himself as someone who had the potential to go viral. He never saw himself as the popular kid in school, he said.

Before creating content on TikTok, he had never imagined himself as someone who had the potential to go viral.

Devina’s version of a lucky strike is also worth recounting. She has been actively creating short-form content on her social media since 2020, trying out different genres over the years, from beauty content to comedy. In 2024, she started doing acting skits. One of her first ones did incredibly well. A 40-second clip on Instagram raking 30 million views, 1.2 million likes, and 10,000 comments. In the clip, she is performing a monologue, acting as a heartbroken lover confronting her partner for choosing her, despite not being in love with her. “If you’ve never liked me, why are we together? If I’m not your type, why didn’t you end things?” she says, as tears roll down her face. That viral post is also pinned on her page.

I’m not going to lie, these numbers are doing something to me—what exactly, I’m not sure. Perhaps my interest is piqued because it challenges what I thought was possible. Having mostly relied on the platforms of my employers to connect to an audience—and to gain a stamp of legitimacy—I wasn’t exactly aware that this is something that you can just do on your own. Yes, it’s a gamble, but in the current state of the world, everything is.

Putting the inquiry into my own interests aside, I noticed something interesting about these numbers. These figures are deeply personal. They are interwoven within a dilemmatic process of becoming the person that you want to be. By that I mean, when you’re gambling with the algorithms, what you’re betting on is not just a moment of virality, but a viral moment in which you feel that the algorithm sees you the way you want to be seen. How do you want to be seen?

That’s as difficult a code to crack, if not more: the codes to your own wishes and desires.

I told Devina and Kharisma I’ve been trying to build an audience for digital field notes, but it’s been slow progress.

“Have you tried hopping on what’s trending?” Devina asked. “Well, not exactly. Maybe I should,” I said. As the conversation went on, there were more questions on strategy. “Do you want to find a mass audience or the right audience?” “The latter.” “Then you don’t need to worry. The algorithm will find you your audience.” There was no hesitation in her voice when she said it.

After her stint in pageantry—she was Miss Bali 2017⁷—it seemed like a natural path for Devina to become a beauty influencer. So that was what she did. There were a lot of beauty shots and product promotions. But she felt a dissonance. The work felt too templated. “If everyone can do it, I don’t want to make it,” she ended up deciding. Today, she is more comfortable introducing herself as a content creator as opposed to an influencer. What’s the difference? I asked. “Influencers sell you a lifestyle. Content creators sell a value, a belief, a way of thinking.”

Having found formats she enjoys creating, personas she is comfortable with, and an audience she feels connected to, Devina’s content creation has found its own rhythm. She has created a system that allows her to post regularly. On days when her schedule is free, she would create as much content as she could. Kharisma, on the other hand, is on a hiatus.

He is unsure about the audience he has been reaching through his content. He has managed to find a niche that attracts a sizable amount of attention. He made content that people find genuinely useful. But in many ways, it’s a one-time transaction. People come to him for answers, and then they go. There is no stickiness to his platform. It’s a catch-22. His content speaks to a segment who are undergoing an important education milestone—which makes them a highly-engaged audience—but once they pass that bar, that’s it. It’s a cyclical audience. They are only there during exam seasons.

“Influencers sell you a lifestyle. Content creators sell a value, a belief, a way of thinking.”

Kharisma, understandably, wanted something else to come from his content creation. A feeling that he’s known as a person, too. Not just a resource for answers.

There is another reason why he is watching from the rail. He has left the academic world. He now works as a researcher at an education startup, and he’d like to keep that work out of the limelight. The problem with a niche is that you have to keep being the person who made it. But what if you have graduated from that chapter? Kharisma has been grappling with this dilemma for some time now. Must his online self be an accurate representation of his offline self? Is it a mask or an extension of himself?

“Can it be both at different times?” I asked. Maybe it’s something that you can take off and put back on? Maybe it’s an extension of you that only gets to live out fully in the online space, as it’s where that self is fully appreciated?

“This conversation is making me think differently about my online self,” Kharisma said.

“How so?” I asked.

“I’ve always thought I need to be the same person. But since chatting, I wonder, why not be angry? Brave? Humorous?” Kharisma had shared that there had been comments in his videos noting him as a soft-spoken person. In the education content creator space, he had seen different personalities working well.

I went on to search for these other content creators myself, to get a better sense of what Kharisma was saying. People—or students—seem to respond to being scolded. I watched one viral clip with millions of views discussing the same topic Kharisma found virality with. This one was rude and filled with contempt. I couldn’t see my friend roleplaying as this kind of person.

“Are you going to change your personality?” I got curious.

“No, I don’t feel true,” he replied. “I want to be me.”

I guess we all flirt with the possibility of a different self. Especially if that self is deemed to be more desirable.

We hugged each other goodbye when we left the cafe that evening, setting a tentative reunion plan whenever we find ourselves in the same city again.

Devina expects to travel between Jakarta and Bali more often. She has found an agency to represent her in Bali. Kharisma wants to continue his studies sometime in the future—sooner, if all goes well. “I should probably stop saying this because I’ve been saying it since forever, and it hasn’t happened,” he said. “Yet,” Devina and I said in sync. I was planning on relocating, or at least being more mobile—take assignments that will allow me to travel—but that will have to wait. I want to build something first. Here, in my hometown.

I drove back home past the area where the three of us used to go to school. We were a tight-knit group back then, as tight-knit a group of 42 kids huddled in the same classroom for three consecutive years could be⁸. At one point, I had memorised everyone’s full name and absent number by heart. Devina, 09. Kharisma, 19. Yunindita, 34. But beyond that, there’s a level of care we had for each other that was, I would say, with all my biases, unique. We were all rooting for one another, wanting our classmates to have their version of the good life. On the table that evening, we joked that we were all “trauma-bonded”⁹. It’s a joke in the sense that we were laughing at the absurdity of it, but it is, in fact, true. Two of our classmates died in a car accident right before a big school trip to Java. When we boarded the plane the day of our field trip, I recall they were handing out newspapers with the scene of the accident featured on the front page. We were kids having to come to terms with mortality at too young an age.

I am left with a rather puzzling question: How do we go from wanting to be known by our friends to wanting to be known by the world? Is it not enough to be known intimately by a few?

These sets of questions came to me as I’m working on this piece. Since the conversation, I’ve started to seriously consider taking virality as a project. “Maybe I should try to go viral.” The carrot being I have a better shot at building an audience if I manage to crack this. It’s not even for monetisation¹⁰. It’s simply so you can say you’ve done it. A rite of passage.

How do we go from wanting to be known by our friends to wanting to be known by the world?

I should probably address the elephant in the room. There is something quite absurd about wanting to build an audience when the world is falling apart. Why gamble at the chance of being seen when life as we know it could be upended at any moment now? When I sit in the living room with my Dad at the end of my work day, the TV airs updates about the war in the Middle East. “Can we change the channel?” my Mom asked at one point, getting frustrated perhaps. “No, I’m following this [development],” my Dad replied. There is no dearth of crises in the world, all of them vying for attention through our media feed. And yet, here we are, strategising for ways to get people to consume our content.

I think there’s something quite revealing about human nature in that. The ordinary persists even when it shouldn’t.

It reminds me of what I read in the book, Lords of Finance. I was amused knowing that, on the brink of a world war, people were still going on vacation. Here’s the excerpt:

Pg. 24: It was hard to get too concerned about a crisis in Central Europe when the prime minister himself, H. H. Asquith, felt sufficiently at ease to insist upon his weekend of golfing in Berkshire, and the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had gone off, as he did every weekend in the summer, to his lodge in Hampshire for a spot of trout fishing.

Here’s another one I found equally, if not more, amusing:

Pg. 101: The imperial dynasty might have fallen and the political system of Germany overturned, but ordinary people went about their everyday business, trying to ignore the demonstrations. [...] Even when shots were randomly fired near the palace, the fleeing crowds remained so instinctively law abiding that they obeyed the signs to keep off the grass.

The absurdity of the project of building an audience at a time like today is probably what makes it most human.

And, if we take it as that, maybe there is something more revealing on the other side of such an acknowledgement. Rather than dismissing it as a vanity project, we could try to understand why. Why do we gamble for attention?

There is a promise we’ve come to associate with algorithmic systems. It is that it is accurate—precise in its projection to the point of knowing what we want before we want it. As someone feeding that system, there lies the hope that with such precision, it could help us garner attention that we wouldn’t have gotten without it. And in stripping attention from the framing of it being a commodity in a capitalistic society, you would soon find that, at its core, it is care. Attention is care. When you ask someone to pay attention to your work, you’re essentially asking them: Hey, do you care about this too? Do you care that I care about this?

Attention is care. When you ask someone to pay attention to your work, you’re essentially asking them: Hey, do you care about this too? Do you care that I care about this?

In writing this piece, I was forced to confront a fundamental question: “Why do I want to be seen?” The best I can come up with is that the feeling that you get from being seen is similar to the feeling that you get from being cared for. And in a world where everything else is falling apart, where institutions you had once found shelter in dwindled away, we’ve come to rely more and more on the promise of care provided by these algorithmic systems.

So, why gamble at all? We gamble because we want to matter. There’s nothing trivial about that.

Devina, then and now

Left photo by yearbook photographer. Right photo by @creativebyajimahareshi

Kharisma, then and now

Left photo by yearbook photographer. Right photo by @by.nindysugitha

Dita, then and now

Left photo by yearbook photographer. Right photo by @agrevinna

1. It was Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney. I mentioned I was going to read the book. Finally got around to it. It was an enjoyable read. My editor, Hasna, made it known that she would not categorise the novel as romance.

2. A reality TV show broadcast on Trans TV, largely based on the format of America’s Next Top Model (ANTM). It ran for two seasons.

3. As suggested by the name, another reality TV show based on ANTM, broadcast on NET. It ran for three cycles.

4. I’ve noticed how talking about “niche” in the content creator industry is similar to discussions about product-market fit (PMF) in startups.

5. A research proposal seminar is an academic presentation where a student shares plans for their research project. It’s considered a high-stakes occasion, with failure in receiving approval potentially leading to a delay in a student’s graduation timeline.

6. There is something about the telling of that which evokes the same presence you would get from a founder telling you they’ve been bootstrapping. Smart and scrappy. Perhaps there are more similarities between the world of startups and content creation than we have given it credit for.

7. To be accurate, Puteri Indonesia Bali, a regional beauty pageant, the winner of which would usually go on to represent the region in Puteri Indonesia, the national beauty pageant.

8. It was a big class, as was often the case for public schools.

9. "Trauma bonding" is widely used to describe close friendships forged through shared hardship, but the term actually originates in psychology to describe the emotional attachment that develops between an abuse victim and their abuser—a bond formed through cycles of harm and relief.

10. Monetisation is nice, and I’m not above it—shout out to my one paying subscriber who just renewed! You’re a gem!