The Joke That Isn’t a Joke
Here’s a hilarity I didn’t order: my long, carefully structured essays about precarity, value, and the quiet violences of “content” get ten times the traffic of my actual handmade work. Google, apparently, is a connoisseur of fury—so long as the fury is arranged in clean paragraphs with descriptive subheads. It wants me furious but literate. It wants my sentences more than my objects. It nods approvingly at my well-behaved rage and then pretends it can’t see the clay animal I made with the same hands.
My analytics read like satire. If I title a post “How Taste Polices the Value of Art,” the robot brings me new friends. If I title a listing “Handmade fox, clay, 7cm, glazed,” the robot throws my fox into a hole. The essays critique the machine; the machine says “more, please.” The objects contain no keywords; the machine looks away like I coughed in church.
It’s a loop so ironic it squeaks: the critique of commodification is the only thing that commodifies well.
How to Be “Valuable” to the Algorithm
Let me share the secret handshake, since we’re all here. Search engines reward clarity, density, structure, and links. They prefer an intro, a thesis, a breakdown, a conclusion. They adore lists like this one. They want you to define your terms, anticipate questions, and wire your paragraphs together like a suspension bridge. In other words, the precise opposite of how handmade work arrives in the world.
A physical object doesn’t come with a bibliography. It isn’t designed for skimmability. It doesn’t bolster its claims with three citations and a chummy FAQ. (Imagine: “Q: Is this cup food safe? A: Yes. Also here’s a block quote about the poetics of containment.”) The work is the proof. It’s heavy. It exists. Its only “keyword” is touch.
But I can make my emotional devastation keyword-friendly. Watch: “creative precarity,” “algorithmic extraction,” “mutual aid,” “handmade vs. machine-made,” “why your feed hates sincerity.” Look at that: I’m a small library now, and the robot is hungry. Meanwhile Google’s Merchant Center is blinking at my shop like an automated concierge trying to pronounce my last name: politely, repeatedly, wrong.
The algorithm doesn’t want my clay foxes; it wants my dissertation about why clay foxes don’t rank.
The Outrage Economy, but Make It Polite
Rage is profitable when it’s formatted. A 17-tweet rant about the death of attention gets buried under the day’s discourse; a 2,000-word essay titled The Ontology of Digital Rage gets an average engagement time of eight minutes and three unsolicited emails saying “I felt this.” Someone, somewhere, wrote a deck explaining how to turn anger into “thought leadership,” and the world said “finally, a mood with bullet points.”
Algorithms don’t read emotion; they read sentence structure. They don’t detect sincerity; they detect subheads. They don’t know whether I meant it or I manufactured it; they only know if I broke up the paragraphs for mobile. The machine can’t feel, so it substitutes feeling with form. If the form looks like authority—orderly, confident, internally linked—the machine will push it forward, even if the content is me calling the machine a vampire with good posture.
This is how outrage becomes a brand without looking like a brand. If you pour it into the right mold, it sets into something professionally legible. If you leave it raw, it’s “noise.” I don’t accept the premise, but I recognize the incentive: fury with grammar sells better than joy with fingerprints.
The Irony Loop
Let me make the loop explicit. I write about the moral theater of “cleanliness” in modern aesthetics. The essay ranks because it uses clear language, semantic HTML, and a table of contents block. Through that optimized doorway walk readers who then see my handmade work: unoptimized on purpose, because search engines keep trying to turn it into a SKU or a spec sheet. The only way to surface the thing that resists commodification is to commodify my refusal neatly enough to be indexed. Congratulations to me; I have search-optimized dissent.
It gets loopier. Someone finds me by googling “why is modern art so commercial” and lands on a page where I say “because everything is packaged and smoothed to fit a sales funnel.” Right below that is a button that says “Support the work.” This is not hypocrisy. This is mapping the system while I walk through it with groceries to buy.
Every critique becomes a commodity the moment it loads on a webpage. You can hate that (fair) or acknowledge it and smuggle people out through the gift shop.
Playing the Game on Purpose
I am not pure. I am strategic. If the only way to route strangers to the handmade is through a longtail of essays that the machine thinks are nutritious, then hand me a thesaurus and a heading hierarchy. I will write the doorway and place my work at the end of it like an altar.
This is not selling out; this is learning the guard’s rotations. It’s disguise: cultural disobedience dressed as “resources.” It’s my craft voice wearing its formal jacket to get into the building, then kicking off its shoes once inside. The trick is not to forget to untie the laces.
Longtail search is slow, unfashionable magic. It draws in the exact people who were already wondering the things I’m wondering. We meet because we typed the same question with different weather. Then the essays do what they’re supposed to do: not convert, not funnel, just point at the work and say, “If this helped, you might like the object that carries the same breath.”
I don’t game the system; I politely inform it that I exist, and it realizes too late it’s been tricked into helping me.
A Brief Field Guide to Algorithmic Silliness (So We Can Laugh)
- The Law of Reasonable Rage: Anger is rewarded only when it looks like a syllabus.
- The Law of Sincere Objects: The more an object resists being described in six bullet points, the less searchable it becomes.
- The Law of Machine Flattery: If you compliment the machine with structure, it will compliment you back with traffic.
- The Law of Emotional SEO: The feelings that rank are the ones that can be summarized. (The feelings that matter can’t.)
- The Law of Inevitable Hypocrisy: Every time you denounce optimization, a small plugin somewhere updates itself and says “heard.”
We can either cry or cackle. I prefer cackling. Crying is dehydrating and saline isn’t archival.
When Anger Becomes a Brand (And How to Dodge That Trap)
There’s a trapdoor under all of this. If you’re not careful, the essays start to eat the work. You wake up one day and realize your voice is calibrated to please a dashboard. Consistency becomes the leash. “Give them more of what performs” is the oldest invitation to self-erasure on earth.
I have no interest in turning anger into a content pillar. So I keep my tone moving: fury, then humor, then tenderness that refuses spectacle. I drop a dense 3,000 words and follow it with a picture of a crooked little clay animal that looks like it knows your secrets. The system wants a brand; I offer it a weather pattern. Consistency is for influencers; I am more of a raccoon with a PhD—intelligent, nocturnal, hard to domesticate, increasingly bold around trash.
The antidote to becoming predictable is to remain specific. Write the thing you actually mean in the shape it actually wants. Some days that’s an essay with a bibliography. Some days it’s a one-line poem and a photograph of a cup with a thumb-smudge that reads like a punctuation mark. If the machine can’t label you, it can’t domesticate you. It can still index you, though. Neat trick.
The Merchant Center Is a Velvet Rope
A short interlude for the practical absurdity: Google’s Merchant Center is a velvet rope with a bouncer who can’t make eye contact with handmade work unless it’s wearing a barcoded tuxedo. It likes UPCs, GTINs, standardized variants, shipping schemas that map onto industrial logic. It likes enormous inventories and identical photo standards. It likes the scent of warehouse.
And here I am with one-of-a-kind pieces that change shape like weather. I have two of something, then none of it, then something related but different because my hands decided to follow the clay instead of a spreadsheet. The Merchant Center stares at me like I’m speaking in metaphors (I am) and says, “Do you have this in 17 colors with consistent metadata?” I say, “No, I have it in the one color that happened when earth met glaze and they negotiated in heat.” The bouncer pats me down for SKUs.
So yes, I kick Google with a steel-toe boot. Not because I think a boot will teach it delight, but because it keeps stepping on my toes and calling it policy. If my essays bring you here, wonderful. If my objects refuse to fit into the little shopping windows, that refusal is part of their honesty.
The Algorithm Is Just a Mirror (A Brutally Literal One)
I don’t believe the machine is evil. I believe it is obedient. It amplifies what we train it to notice, which is currently: conflict, certainty, the comfort of tidy answers, and the endurance sport of looking professional. It’s a mirror with no depth perception. It reflects back formats, not souls. It can tell you which paragraph most people stop at; it cannot tell you if someone quietly changed their mind.
I use the mirror the way you use any mirror: not to tell me who I am, but to catch spinach in my teeth and then go on with my day. If the mirror says people like headings, I will give them headings and then write something they didn’t expect under each one. If the mirror says the word “handmade” is overused, I will use it anyway, because the alternative is pretending the factory and the kitchen table are the same room.
If the only way to make the handmade visible is to disguise it as metadata, then fine. I’ll tag my sincerity and call it strategy. Then, when you arrive, I will hand you something that cannot be parsed by a crawler: weight, warmth, a surface that remembers you touched it.
Laughing From Inside the Machine
Here’s the punchline: the essays that rank and the objects that don’t were both made by the same hands. One fits better in the robot’s mouth; the other dissolves on its tongue. I’m not offended. I’m pragmatic. The goal isn’t to win the game. The goal is to reroute the power the game accidentally gives me into a little room where the work can be itself.
So yes, I will keep writing pieces the machine mistakes for authority if that’s what it takes to introduce you to work that refuses to be a product line. I will keep switching registers so it can’t train on my mood. I will keep laughing at the ridiculousness of being rewarded for essays about why rewards are broken. I will keep putting the “Support the work” button beneath all of it, because the work requires groceries and I refuse to develop a tragic backstory for click-through.
If irony keeps the lights on, I’ll take it. The point was never to be pure. The point was to endure long enough to make things honestly, to send them into the world with the right names, and to welcome anyone who finds me because a search engine accidentally pointed at a door and said: this way, toward the person yelling politely.
Come for the subheads. Stay for the fingerprints.
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