Haunting your ex’s algorithm

"I am day by day, Pilates video by Pilates video, decimating his carefully curated YouTube algorithm."

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

This is a guest essay from my beautiful, brilliant, and hilarious (emphasis hers) friend and fellow writer, Rachel, who mentioned this idea to me offhand at the gym, and who I insisted immediately go home and write it. As is Embedded tradition, she got $100. —Kate

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I—unlike any of the men I have been involved with in the two years since he and I broke up—am completely over my most recent ex. I no longer pine, miss, or mourn; I do not look back on the good times or ruminate on what could have been. I spent two-and-a-half brutal years trapped in a relationship that caused me to isolate myself from friends, lose my ability to focus on work, ignore basic self-care needs, stay up until 6 am and sleep until 4 pm, drink two bottles of wine each night, and be belittled, humiliated, emotionally manipulated, and otherwise tormented in a manner that has my therapist using TikTok terms like “trauma bond,” “attachment wounds,” “depersonalization,” and “C-PTSD”—and all for what? Unlimited access to free alcohol? The illusion of being “wanted” occasionally by someone who wanted nothing to do with me the rest of the time? “Proof” that I was undeserving of love? Sex?????? (Yes, yes, yes, and, unfortunately, also yes.)

Eventually, he did me the enormous favor of leaving me for someone with baby bangs. I cried for weeks, until I dry heaved, until I burst blood vessels in my face, and then dusted myself off, started doing hot yoga, and began the very difficult, ongoing work of “healing.” Whatever the fuck that is.

But I’m getting mine. I am day by day, Pilates video by Pilates video, decimating his carefully curated YouTube algorithm.

A visual representation of said disrupted algorithm, courtesy of Kate.

I have been logged into his Premium account on my phone since 2021, but as a hater of short-form video (yeah, you heard me), I wasn’t using this privilege to its full potential until recently.

Having dated him, as it was, for two-and-a-half years of my one life, I know exactly what this man uses YouTube for: alternative film development processes, Forensic Files, dark techno and house music deep cuts (he may have been verbally abusive, but he did introduce me to Moodymann), Brooks and Capehart, old episodes of everything from Jeopardy to Da Ali G Show…

By contrast, here is what I am looking for on YouTube: