Wellness

 It is April 2008, and Lawrence Baker has just joined Facebook.
 The algorithm is like a waiter, and Lawrence is a diner who stares at the menu but never orders food. That is, not until the day the algorithm asks: Do you know Jack Baker?
 And Lawrence sits there staring at that prompt for a full fifteen minutes before finally confirming it – Yes – whereby the algorithm launches a friend request.
 This connection with Jack seems to inspire a new enthusiasm for the prompts he had been previously ignoring, and he goes ahead and reaches out to other friends within the network, and he identifies a few interests and hobbies, and he writes his first tentative updates and posts a photo.
 He chooses a profile picture, and his friends seem to love it. He posts about the Chiefs game, and his friends seem to love it. Even just his comments about the weather and the wind generate a flurry of positive response.
 It is the most contact he's had with the wider world in years.
 Each of Lawrence's actions and combinations of actions, each post and like, each comment and message, each bit of logged data is but one dimension the algorithm uses to compare Lawrence with Facebook's other billion accounts in an effort to figure out what, exactly, he is.
 Lawrence, of course, has no idea this is happening. But he does notice the new and troubling updates now populating his feed. These mostly have to do with people getting sick. Often, children.
 Lawrence reads and clicks and comments on all of them, often telling whoever posted the story or update or photo or video that it caused him to choke up a little bit and that he's sending his warmest wishes.
 And the algorithm translates all of this activity into its relevant abstracted mathematical values and compares them many-dimensionally to all other account data to find that Lawrence seems to match up pretty closely to other American Facebook users for whom the specific subject of “Illness” and the more general subject of “Contamination” prove to be highly salient. Which is why Lawrence keeps seeing these stories and updates and videos about sick children, so many sick children that it seems like there's some kind of epidemic going on, that the number of children who are dangerously, dramatically sick is higher now than at any other point he can ever remember. He does not consider the possibility that the number of sick children in the world is roughly constant and that the variable here is how many of these sick children he's exposed to via Facebook.
 These new connections are added to his profile data, whereby the Pattern Recognition algorithm determines, based on various affinity matrices and edge strengths and eigenvalues and principal component analyses, that Lawrence clusters pretty seamlessly with members of certain wellness-related Facebook groups – among them, the Health Freedom Network and the Awakened Patient Project and the Big Pharma Report and ScienceAlert and CancerTruth and the Truth Unleashed and the Truth Movement and What Your Doctor Isn't Telling You and so forth – all of which the algorithm recommends to him, and all of which, as it predicted, he faithfully joins.
 The ideas and theories and facts that Lawrence encounters in these particular Facebook communities are, to put it mildly, distressing. They are so distressing and troubling and occasionally downright disturbing that he decides he really needs to verify them independently.
 [He] clicks over to Google and slowly types into the search bar all of the pressing questions:
 Do cell phone towers really cause cancer?
 Are jet contrails really poisonous?
 Is the fluoride the government puts into the drinking water actually making the population so foggy-headed and dumb and passive that we don't notice all of these obvious plots and lies?
 Of course, Lawrence does not consider the basic flaw in his search logic: namely, that websites about whether fluoride is poisonous are almost always made by people who believe that, yes, it definitely is.
 Here then begins a phase where Lawrence returns to those questionable new Facebook groups and comments on their pages about how he was initially dubious about their claims but then “I did my own research,” he says, “to make up my own mind,” he says, whereby he found, much to his shock and dismay, that the claims “checked out,” and it's at this point in each of these various groups where the acceptance and support and love from the group is cast upon Lawrence like a warm summer dawn.