Thinking. The Museum of the Present. an Algorithmic State
We have become curators of endless digital museums, feeding the algorithm with content we’ll never revisit. The fear of disappearing drives self-surveillance, turning absence into irrelevance. Yet, some might begin to reject the cycle, embracing obscurity and impermanence.
Perhaps the next true rebellion lies in stepping beyond the algorithmic gaze.
The Museum of the Present.
We have become curators of an infinite, unwatched museum.
Every second, a new exhibit appears: a selfie, a thought, a clip, a timestamped moment flattened into content and sent into the ether. Our archives grow, and a towering, labyrinthine room fills with things we will never revisit. We keep building, not truly out of nostalgia, although that's what we might tell ourselves, but out of fear—of being forgotten and ceasing to exist in the gaze of the machine.
At its core, a true museum is not a vault but a vessel. They are designed to be a spaces of self, cultural and social reflection, a sanctuary where time is slowed, where meaning is distilled rather than churned through. Museums do not exist simply to hold objects; they exist to hold context. They are places intended to be where the past is not just displayed but activated—where artefacts speak, where histories unfurl, and where silence is as valuable as spectacle.
A true museum does not demand endless accumulation. It does not seek to drown visitors in excess (although this may have shifted in more recent times) but to guide them towards understanding and reflection. Unlike our self archive, it does not discard what does not perform. It preserves what is fragile, complex and that which resists easy categorisation.
A museum exhibition is created to be a conversation across time, not a content feed that devours itself. they are places where meaning deepens rather than depletes, where absence is just as significant as presence, where not everything is available at once, demanding to be seen now before it is lost to the next wave of updates.
Indivisualistic Archives
But OUR museums to individualism are unlike any that came before them, unlike traditional archives used to preserve the past for reflection, future generations, and to find meaning. Our algorithmic archives are not designed to be revisited. We're not building to serve our memory but due to the momentum of things outside ourselves. Each post, thought, and pixel proof is collected to show evidence of our existence, forming a tiny offering to a system that will never look back, only forward.
Traditional museums are collective by nature. They are built to house shared histories, preserve cultural memory, and remind us that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Even when flawed—when shaped by colonial narratives, power, and exclusion—they are still, in essence, spaces of communal reckoning.
They ask us to look beyond the self, to see ourselves as threads in a larger, interwoven story.
However, we do not collect for the collective. our selfies, screenshots and notes are not for a shared library of meaning; it is a million isolated timelines, a billion fragmented self-narratives, endlessly updating. These are museums of the self—private, sprawling, self-curated exhibits of individual existence. algorithms have no interest in cohesion, continuity, or a history that belongs to all. they reward singularity, the personal over the collective, the micro over the macro.
In these new museums, we are both artists and audiences, artefacts and archivists. We do not document to contribute to a shared memory—we document to assert that we were here and mattered. And yet, our personal histories feel strangely weightless. Without collective framing, they can often seem to blur together, becoming less like history and more like noise—moments designed not to be remembered but to be witnessed.
REgime of Relevance.
Increasingly, it is beginning to feel like we do not live in the world but in the feed, within an Algorithmic State—a system of being in which every thought, creation, and activity is processed, weighed, and ranked. Algorithmic systems no longer serve as passive observers but as the architects of our actions, the not-so-hidden hand reshaping culture in real-time. It decides what we see, who we are seen as, and what should matter to us. It becomes no longer just a tool—but a regime, and we are its devoted citizens.
Like all regimes, it demands loyalty. To stay relevant, we must keep producing and content must be churned out before it spoils. There is no time for slowness or contemplation, no space for the unmarketable or the unoptimised. Only the most clickable and viral survive.
This is not just a state of being but a state of worship. The algorithmic state does not ask for obedience—it asks for devotion. We check our engagement numbers like priests reading omens, divine our worth through impressions, and live in anticipation of the next offering we must make. And just as with any god, failure to appease it comes with exile. A post that flops is not just ignored; it is seen as a quiet rebuke and a reminder that we might be slipping into irrelevance.
ALgorithm of perception.
Younger generations potentially will not just live with algorithms; they may well begin to see through them. It's possible, having lived with it since birth, that algorithmic awareness becomes not just the structure of publication and self-promotion but a psychedelic state, a way of perceiving the world through a shifting, fragmented kaleidoscope of trending aesthetics, viral ideologies, and algorithmically favoured narratives. The flicker of short-form videos shape consciousness, the rhythmic loops of content streams, the predictive logic of machine-fed trends.
For some, this ingestion may end up being total. Some ultimately may see themselves not as individuals but as ever-mutable digital selves, avatars constantly shifting to match the prevailing aesthetic of the feed. Humour becomes algorithmic, desires curated, and rebellions pre-packaged. Algorithms may eventually become an extension of the neural pathways.
To reject an algorithmic state is not simply a refusal to post—it is an act of severance from the dominant mode of reality. I can't count the number of posts I've seen on social media platforms that state 'time to leave the app', and yet we don't, we can't.
Slaves to the Archive.
Once, silence was a neutral state—pausing, retreating, and disappearing for a while was an unremarkable part of life. Now, it feels unnatural, even suspicious. The rhythm of digital existence does not allow for long gaps, and to go quiet is to invite speculation and subtly announce something is wrong.
We may kid ourselves that endless documentation is about preservation, but more often, it is about reassurance—the reassurance of still being part of the conversation, of still being visible, of maintaining the rhythm of self-disclosure. When we step away, even momentarily, we feel the dissonance—the sudden drop in stimulation, the absence of an audience. It is not just that others might forget us; we might forget how to perform ourselves outside of an algorithmic frame.
For many, going dark is not about choice but negotiation—how long can one disappear before it is noticed? How much absence is allowed before relevance starts to wane? The anxiety is not necessarily about being forgotten entirely but about returning to find the space we occupied quietly reshaped, filled by something—or someone—else.
Dead Museums.
So we continue to hoard—endless screenshots, voice notes, drafts, half-written thoughts that will never be reread. An entire ecosystem of dead data floats in cloud servers, waiting for a return that will never come. These are not personal histories. They are the debris of an age obsessed with documentation.
The museum of the present is not a place of wonder—it is a mausoleum, rows of digital tombs filled with things that once meant something, briefly, before they were swallowed by the churn of the next.
We create under the illusion that all of this will be useful one day—that we will one day return to the archives, revisit our old selves, and find meaning in the accumulation. But there is no time for retrospection. The speed of content does not allow for return journeys, and the past is not an archive—it is a wasteland. And yet, the hoarding continues, as if by sheer accumulation, we can prove we were here.
Anti-Algorithmic Art Movement.
So what's next? It's hard to predict movements, but I feel an anti-algorithmic movement will likely emerge. We will see people not creating for algorithms, not handing their work over to be dissected, repackaged, and sold back to them as content.
I see a time when artists make music designed to vanish, films with no trailers, and paintings that exist only in hidden spaces. I predict the embracing of the ephemeral, the untraceable, the sacred act of creation without an audience.
We will choose to be forgotten, because in forgetting, we are free.
Some artists will create within encrypted, closed loops—networks invisible to the public, where art does not have to fight for attention. Others will lean into impermanence, creating experiences that disappear once witnessed, rejecting the impulse to capture. Event promotion will return to mediums that cannot be digitised at all—zines, hand-passed mixtapes, oral traditions.
This group will not be Luddites or nostalgists. They will be rebels in a world that demands documentation. Their art will exist beyond the grid, beyond the algorithmic gaze. They are moving outside the archive, slipping away from the quiet tyranny of engagement.