"“There was something very programmed about the way I was living,” he told The Atlantic, contemplating the implications it had for his free will. Like many a man, he then had something of an existential crisis while going to a bar with his friends. “The new hip bar is exactly where a computer would expect me to go,” he remembered thinking, recalling all the apps and platforms that sent him to the same spots perfectly optimized for his interests, without ever challenging him to try something meaningfully new and different."
"Being a programmer, Max came up with a programmer's solution. He made an app to summon an Uber that would take him to a surprise location in the city. Only the driver knew his destination. “His experiments were like uncertainty exposure therapy,” The Atlantic wrote. He visited a leather bar, a planetarium, and a bowling alley he never knew about on the other side of town."
"Soon, he became addicted to algorithm-ordained chaos, randomizing decisions like where he ate, the tattoos he got, and what music he listened to. “In choosing randomly,” Max told the magazine, “I found freedom.” Max even quit his cushy Google job in 2015 and surrendered himself to another algorithm he designed to choose where he should live around the world."
Max, a San Francisco tech worker, felt his life was becoming robotic and programmed. He noticed apps and platforms repeatedly routed him to the same places optimized for his interests, limiting meaningful novelty. During an existential crisis, he created an app that summoned an Uber to a surprise destination, with only the driver knowing where he would go. He visited new locations across the city and began randomizing decisions about food, tattoos, and music. He quit a Google job and used another algorithm to decide where he would live, moving to different cities for over two years. Random choice became a way to regain freedom.
Read at Futurism
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