Sexuality Generator

I enjoy Buzzfeed quizzes and online personality tests as much as the next Millennial, but shouldn't we be skeptical when an algorithm claims to tell us who we are? 

A new trend in online forums and personal narratives has recently sprung  up where  users credit TikTok’s For-You-Page (FYP) and other social media algorithms for revealing their real sexual identities. A quick search for this trend will produce titles like “TikTok’s algorithms knew I was bi before I did,” “TikTok made me (realize I was) gay,” and even “The TikTok algorithm knew my sexuality better than I did.” The primary issue with these algorithms, however, is that they operate in a black box. We often know what goes into these programs (users’ data) and we know what comes out (content and recommendations), but few understand what exactly occurs inside the program, itself. 

Sexuality Generator highlights the issues with this trend through a series of seemingly pointless questions that purport to gauge a user's sexual preferences. Through  glitches, non sequiturs, limited (and limiting options), and a tendency towards compulsory heterosexuality, this game is designed to illustrate  how nonsensical our digital ways of "knowing" can often be. Theorists like Sandy Stone have beautifully illustrated the ways in which digital tools and platforms can extend the will, our instrumentality, our identities, but these extensions can also be paradoxically limiting. This generator explores these limits.