The Golden Deer We Keep Chasing

By Sister Shireen Chada

What Sita’s abduction has to teach us about the feed

Sita is in the forest, in the years of exile, and she has wanted for nothing. Then a deer steps out at the edge of the trees, its coat of gold, jewels worked into the hide, light coming off it in pieces. She had never wanted a golden deer, had never seen one, and the wanting is already total, enough that she sends the husband sworn to protect her into the woods to catch it for her.

The deer was not a deer. It was a demon named Maricha, sent to draw her out into the open. She had been made to want a thing that did not exist, and from the inside there was no seam to it. It felt like her own wish, the way every wish she had ever had felt like hers.

The feed was always a trap

“Every social media company has one part whose only job is to decide what shows up on your screen. People call it the algorithm, a set of rules a person wrote down for a machine to follow. Nothing mysterious in it. The feed was built to keep you there, and for years it ran on plain rules a person could read. The trap was built before AI touched it.”

The AI that had already gone to work on you has no face and no window, unlike the chatbot you type to. It had been sorting your feed for years before that, working out its own rules from millions of examples no one can read back. Keep you watching, the aim never changed. Most of what you watch now is chosen by it, not searched for. It felt like choosing the whole time.

Maya

My tradition has a word for this. Maya. People translate it as illusion, a trick of the eye, something out there to see through. It is closer to an illusion of wanting, a desire that did not start in you, that arrives feeling like your own.

There are three lies folded into the deer, stacked one on the next.

The first is that the wanting is yours. It is not. Sita had not spent a year longing for a golden deer and at last found one. There was no longing until the deer stepped out. The want and the deer arrived in the same instant, from the same source. A temptation, you can see, you feel it pull and you decide. Maya is the pull you never feel as a pull. You cannot say no to a hook you cannot feel.

The second is that the deer is real. It is not. Behind the gold there is a demon, and behind the bright clip there is nothing at all, only the next one.

The third I missed the longest, and it is the worst of them. Even if she caught it, it would not have been enough. The deer was bait, and bait is not meant to be eaten. It draws the animal into the open, and the catch was never on offer. A want that someone puts in you cannot be filled by the thing it points at. She would hold the deer and feel nothing, and the wanting would already have slid to the next gold shape at the treeline. This is why the feed has no bottom, why the enough that would let you set it down is the one thing it is built to keep just short of reach.

In our teaching the pull comes in five forms. Lust, anger, greed, attachment, and the wish to be seen. We miss them in ourselves, where they are quiet, dressed as staying informed.

For years my pull was anger, dressed as being informed, geopolitics, who was funding whom. One headline would open a sitting, and forty-five minutes later I would come up holding a verdict, certain I understood. The feed had a clearer picture of what catches me than I do, so I gave the small version of Maya a name. Algorithmic Maya, the veil made personal, run by a machine that knows the part of my own wanting I am blind to. It used to take a lifetime to learn a person this well. Now it takes a week.

The deer costs

The deer was doing a second job while it ran. Rama went after it because Sita asked him to, and when he did not come back she sent Lakshmana after him too, drawing both men guarding her into the trees after a thing that was never real. While she stood there alone, Ravana came and took her.

The feed works the same way. While you chase the bright nothing, the real thing is carried off behind you. That real thing is your attention. You think it costs nothing, because no money leaves your hand. They are paid in money, hundreds of billions of dollars a year, between the handful of companies that run the feeds. It is the price they were paid for keeping you reaching after a deer that was never real.

It does not let me off either. The feed studied me through my own hands, every clip I slowed down on. It only ever caught me on a hook already in me. The only veil I can lift is my own, and it is the one I cannot see.

The question I have left

An algorithm follows rules a person wrote. AI writes its own. That difference is real, and it is not what matters. The feed was a trap on plain rules. AI made it a far stronger one. Neither the rules nor the AI was ever the danger. The aim was.

The danger is that there is a deer at the edge of my own forest, gold and not real, and I want it, and the wanting feels like mine, and most days I cannot see it for what it is. Point this machine at your clarity and it will leave you alone. Point it at your compulsion and it will build you that deer, all day, getting better at it every day.