Book of Daze: Write Your Own Algorithm Day
Write Your Own Algorithm Day began with a mild public breakdown. In 2023, a mid-level content strategist named Darren K. posted a fourteen-part thread explaining that his life had been “suppressed.” Not by enemies, not by fate, but by “engagement patterns that failed to surface his truth.” Darren had, by his own accounting, been “shadow-muted by algorithms.”
Darren’s willingness to accept responsibility for his outcomes ended with the invention of the “For You” page. At that point responsibility was quietly outsourced to a series of invisible decisions made by people who wear hoodies to AI development meetings.
Within hours of Darren’s post, thousands of people had voiced their agreement. Within days, several of them began drawing diagrams. Within weeks, someone asked the obvious question: if an algorithm can decide what you see, why can you not decide what you see? The holiday was born.
To Observe Write Your Own Algorithm Day, take control of the inputs, the outputs, and the quiet manipulations in between. The goal is not to improve your life, but to make the machinery visible enough so that you can pretend you were always in charge.
Start with your feeds. Remove anything that makes you feel inferior, enraged, or briefly enlightened. Retain only content that confirms your existing worldview or features a dog behaving improbably like a person.
Next, assign weights to your relationships. Rank friends, family, and acquaintances based on usefulness, entertainment value, and their ability to validate your decisions within three business days. Anyone who introduces friction is downgraded to “legacy content.”
Then establish a direction engine for your own behavior. If a choice leads to immediate gratification, increase its future probability. If it leads to growth, reflection, or long-term benefit, bury it where you will not encounter it again.
By the conclusion of Write Your Own Algorithm Day, you should have accomplished several measurable outcomes: You will have reduced the complexity of your life to a series of sortable preferences. You will have confirmed that your instincts, when properly reinforced, can be made to look like wisdom. You will have constructed a system that rewards you for being yourself, provided that “yourself” is defined narrowly enough to avoid inconvenience.
Most importantly, you will have demonstrated that the line between influence and authorship is thin, negotiable, and easily crossed when nobody is looking.
The algorithm, it turns out, was never the enemy. It was a mirror with better marketing.
And now it is yours.
Browse the full Book of Daze →