Feed or Dream? The Algorithmic Reverie
The feed scrolls like a dream: fragments, blurry faces, familiar sounds. Nothing makes sense — and yet, everything resonates. The theory of montage by Sergei Eisenstein might shed some light.
Tuesday Night on Earth. Letter written between 2 or 3 dreams. Feel free to share, like, or drop me an email.
Scrolling can sometimes feel like lucid dreaming. A stream of seemingly illogical images and sounds unfolds: a video of an improbable choreography, followed by a clip from a talk show, then an unboxing of faceless beauty products. You blink. Where are we? Who’s speaking to us? What part of us is this answering to?
The Feed, an Unconscious Montage
We must turn to the theory of montage by Sergei Eisenstein, a Soviet filmmaker from the 1920s and one of the pioneers of cinematic editing. For him, montage wasn’t just a collage of shots, but a collision between them, a shock that produces a new meaning. Juxtaposing two seemingly unrelated images could trigger a powerful idea or emotion in the viewer. A famous example: a neutral face followed by a plate : the brain interprets hunger. The same face followed by a coffin : sadness. It’s not the image that changes, but the combination that creates meaning.
Social media feeds juxtapose content without apparent logic, but the brain still generates meaning. It’s an involuntary, algorithmic montage that yields interpretation, just like a dream. The brain only perceives a tiny portion of the information we scroll through; our interpretation of the feed relies on a reflexive mechanism, fed by billions of assumptions and unconscious cues. TikTok in particular mirrors this kind of “unconscious montage”: recurring sounds, unfamiliar faces that seem familiar, recurring themes (death, childhood, fear, desire, love…). The platform becomes a revealer of personal and collective archetypes, suggesting juxtapositions as uncanny as those in our sleep.
Déjà Vu, Synchronicities, and Escaping the Real
In The Scent of Time and In the Swarm, philosopher Byung-Chul Han critiques our digital society, marked by speed, fluidity, and the disappearance of stable forms.
“We no longer inhabit the earth and the sky; we inhabit Google Earth and the Cloud. The world is becoming increasingly elusive, cloudy, and spectral,” he writes. “Nothing is tenable or tangible anymore.”
Byung-Chul Han
The endless stream of images and information prevents contemplation, distancing, and slowness. He speaks of “smoothness”: platforms offer soft, pleasing content, optimized to be scrolled through seamlessly, an aesthetic without resistance, that neither shocks nor jars, but eventually dissolves us.
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This waking dream of the timeline is born from this aesthetic of flow: we never stop, content glides over us like a dream we’ve already forgotten.
It’s amplified by what might be called “algorithmic déjà vu”: a scene you just witnessed in real life appears in your feed hours later. Or you think of someone, and stumble on a post that mentions their name. These seemingly random successions often give the impression that the algorithm is tapping into our dreams or fleeting thoughts.
This constant scrolling, between wakefulness and sleep, alters our perception of time and reality. The feed becomes a liminal space, a threshold between our deep emotions and their social expression. We experience micro-dreams: 12 seconds of melancholy, 8 seconds of nostalgic joy, 3 seconds of discreet eroticism.
Are algorithms clumsy dreamers? In their prisons of attention, our intimate selves (memories, obsessions, impulses…) become the raw material of the feed.
The Stat of the Week: 66%
According to Luc Rouban (Cevipof), 66% of French people say they deliberately distance themselves from politics in their everyday lives. A democratic time bomb, as aptly noted in an excellent LinkedIn post by Raphaël Llorca.
Amazing links
Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness travelling exhibition (Dezeen)
Like me, my seven-year-old daughter loves fashion. Can I protect her from a world of impossible beauty standards? (The Guardian)
Have a great week! This newsletter is written with love, passion, and (French) coffee. Feel free to share this newsletter, like, comment, or keep sending me emails: these notifications are a joy.
My book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.