“Suppose someone invented an instrument, a convenient little talking tube which, say, could be heard over the whole land... I wonder if the police would not forbid it, fearing that the whole country would become mentally deranged if it were used.” — Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, 1843-1855
In Novi, Michigan, an apparently delusional woman staying with her 20-year-old cat at a cheap hotel has a message for the world. What it is, I am not exactly sure, but I have been following her attempts for weeks while she posts updates on X and YouTube. They’ve been popping up as ads in my feed — signified by a small grey “ad” label in the top right corner — so that I now have a decently tuned sense of her antics, which include posting videos of herself wandering into other people’s rooms, arguing with hotel management and being visited by police, who politely ask her to tone down her activities. She has posted the hotel’s address and asked Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, whom she supports, to come and help her. According to videos she’s shared on YouTube, it appears that she was present at the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. In another video she wears a hat lined with aluminium foil, claiming it helps with her headaches.
This woman didn’t enter my life out of nowhere. This sort of inscrutable “content”, propelled by the mysterious processes that forced it to my attention, has colonised online spaces like an invasive species. If you’ve spent much time on the consumer internet in the past decade, you probably have encountered “chumboxes” — grids of ads with images that can be weird, sexual, heart-warming or just plain confusing. They might promise transformative medical treatments, get-rich-quick schemes, or tales of alien autopsies and government conspiracies. And like the lowest-quality supermarket tabloids in the checkout line, they’re impulse buys — flashy, strange inducements to click first, reconsider later.