You’re not just distracted, you’re being reengineered
Every interaction, thought and moment is increasingly influenced by algorithms that quietly mould how you live, think and understand yourself. In this environment, where metrics define your experiences and engagement dictates your worth, the space for ambiguity, reflection and curiosity is rapidly shrinking.
That’s why I created Strange Loop over a year ago.
What began as a small experiment in writing about culture, technology, and attention has become a global conversation. Strange Loop is read in 23 countries by people arriving from very different points in the journey. Some found it through essays on AI or travel, others through the attention economy series, and many of you through in-person keynotes and conversations. But not everyone started with the core idea: what a strange loop actually is.
So this piece steps back. Not to introduce the term (I didn’t coin it) but to expand it for the world we now inhabit (that’s my part). Because the strange loop has escaped philosophy and become the operating logic of modern life.
What is a Strange Loop?
A strange loop is a system with layers where, as you move up or down those layers, you eventually end up back where you started.
Think Escher’s staircase:
You keep climbing, yet you’re somehow on the same floor.
The idea was popularised by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach and later in I Am a Strange Loop.
The original definitions of these loops were as a paradox of self-reference.
Why Strange Loops have changed
The strange loop isn’t just a mind-bending idea anymore, but how daily life runs. Let me explain.
Phones, platforms and markets now measure what we do, model what we’ll do next, and monetise those predictions on a constant loop. It is hard to overstate the impact of algorithms amidst global technocapitalism.
Politics, culture, the economy—even how we eat, learn, date—are plugged into systems that watch, predict and optimise in real time. Outputs feed back into inputs, so the system keeps editing the world it’s measuring. This is a strange loop.
Start with measurement. There are clicks, watch time, location, purchases. All of these are boiled down to numbers. Those numbers are modelled and from there, algorithms rank, recommend, and price using those numbers. Then, the third step: monetisation. The models are tuned to maximise revenue (ads, sales, engagement, retention).
This is the loop in action:
This last stage, monetisation, is the kicker. When the incentive is towards engagement, the system privileges whatever best keeps you there. That creates selection pressure for content and offers that spike attention (novelty, outrage, desire), and it penalises anything that doesn’t move the metric. Over time, the model doesn’t just predict behaviour, it produces it. Your feed, prices, prompts, and notifications are continuously reshaped to maximise the very signals they measure, so yesterday’s click becomes tomorrow’s default.
What that incentive does, in practice:
Goodhart’s law: once engagement is the target, the system games it (clickbait, doom-scroll loops, FOMO discounts). This is why you feel constantly baited, restless, and pulled back in even when you don’t want to be.
Emotional optimisation: content tilts towards stimuli that extend sessions (novelty, outrage, identity hits). This is why you feel more agitated, validated, or hooked than informed.
Manufactured demand: rankings/prices/prompts don’t just forecast; they create interest by timing and salience.This is why you feel sudden urges to watch/buy now that didn’t exist five minutes ago.
Agency narrowing: choices seem free, but the menu was pre-filtered by what spiked the metric last time. This is why you feel like you chose freely, then later wonder why every option looked the same.
Self-reinforcement: outputs (what you see/pay) become inputs (what you do next), tightening the loop. This is why you feel your tastes hardening and your habits calcifying without a conscious decision.
So what’s different now?
We never had that monetisation stage. The weird loop isn’t theoretical anymore, but operational and always-on, measuring every system we live within.
My new definition of a strange loop needed three preconditions that only converged in the past decade:
Total digitisation: Almost every human action from communication and movement, to purchase and attention, now leaves machine-readable traces. The world became measurable.
Real-time computation: Cloud infrastructure and machine learning can process and respond to that data instantly. Prediction and reaction happen in the same moment.
Incentive alignment: Under technocapitalism, every loop is monetised. The goal isn’t understanding but optimisation: keeping you watching, buying, or moving in ways that raise the metric.
Before this convergence, feedback was slow and local: opinion polls every quarter, sales figures each season, ratings after broadcast. Now feedback is continuous, granular, and financialised. The loop no longer observes the world, it runs it.
And why is this concerning? We don’t fully govern or understand these loops; we mostly react to them. Alignment, oversight and genuine opt-outs are still immature. So the loop runs, but our control of it doesn’t.
So that’s what this platform is about.
Strange Loop is a response to the algorithmic pressures that are not just reshaping how we engage with technology, but more critically, who we are becoming in the process. It’s a space for those who sense that something essential is being lost when everything is optimised, measured and commodified. It’s for those who believe that slowness, curiosity and contradiction are vital to truly understanding ourselves and the world around us. In our current moment which demands constant expression, certainty and personal branding, the right to remain undefined, to not have all the answers and to reject engagement as a proxy for value may be the most important act of resistance today.
Why All This Matters
Strange Loop isn’t about offering easy answers or marketable solutions. Part of the very nature of resisting the loop is not having every answer, but simply awareness of the problem. Embracing the complexities and contradictions of our modern, technology-driven world, and creating a space where we can challenge the systems that define us, is what matters most. Here, we’ll explore what it means to live intentionally in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms—and, more crucially, how to carve out spaces for autonomy, creativity and ambiguity amidst these pressures.
I invite you to join me on this journey. Together, we’ll question the systems that seek to simplify and commodify our experience. Through reflection, writing, and deliberate thought, we’ll explore what it means to reclaim the undefinable parts of ourselves in an era of digital control.
So whether you just joined the space last week or have been here for the year, stay tuned, and let’s continue this exploration of the messy, unquantifiable complexities of human experience.