Categorising What I Am Is Not the Same as Understanding Who I Am

I stopped to rest in a forest windbreak hut with my daughter a few weeks ago, one of those simple wooden shelters you find along Nordic hiking trails, three walls and a roof, built for exactly this, waiting out weather that hasn't decided what it's doing yet. She thought it was a good place to run in circles. I ended up reading the walls instead.

Someone had been carving and writing on that wood for decades. Names, dates, hearts, the odd swear word, wonky handwriting layered over other wonky handwriting, some of it so faded it had to be a decade or two older than the marks around it. Misspelled words. A few genuinely clever lines. Mostly not clever at all, just someone bored in the rain deciding to leave something behind.

Nobody curated any of it. Nobody decided which carving deserved to stay and which one didn't. It just accumulated, one person at a time, with no relationship to each other except having sat in the same dry corner waiting for the same rain to pass.

There's a kind of creative expression that only shows up under specific conditions. A windbreak hut in the rain turns out to be one of them: nothing to do, nobody watching, a surface that will hold whatever you put on it without judging it first. Most of the internet is built to be the opposite of that surface.

Almost everything online runs on what can be categorised. Gender, age, what you click, what you linger on, what you share. I know exactly what a platform has decided about me, because it keeps showing me the evidence. I'm a woman in my thirties who will stay logged on for five more minutes for a satisfying cleaning video, kitchen steam wiped off a hob, grass trimmed into a perfect edge, a horse's hoof scraped clean. I watch all of it. That tells the platform something real about what I consume. It tells it absolutely nothing about how I actually see the world, what I find beautiful, or strange, or worth sitting with for a minute. The algorithm has a very accurate model of what I am. It has come nowhere near what it would take to understand who I am, and it isn't built to try.

That gap is easiest to feel on social media specifically, because the version of you that exists in the data there is a set of behavioural patterns stitched together, not a person. And the spaces where something more expressive might happen have quietly contracted over the years, not because anyone decided creativity was unwelcome, but because platforms optimise for whatever they can measure, and expression without a purpose doesn't measure well. How would you even put a number on the creative value of a scribble on a hut wall. There's no click to track, no watch time, no share count. By the metrics that run most of the internet, it doesn't exist.

I built Texture Grid partly as an answer to this, though I didn't think of it that clearly at the time. It doesn't ask who you are. It gives you a word and asks how you respond to it through texture, with no right answer and no progress bar to complete. The output is a texture choice, not a demographic. You can't sort it into an age bracket or an interest category, because it was never collected as one. That was deliberate, not an accident of the build. It's a small attempt at a space with some of the same conditions as that hut in the forest: nobody watching, no wrong answer, a surface that holds whatever you put on it.

I think about this every time I see another product pitched to institutions as a way to "know your audience better," because knowing usually means the same thing it means everywhere else online: categorising behaviour, building a profile, sorting people into segments that make the next campaign more efficient. Museums and cultural institutions are being offered a version of this too, dressed up as visitor insight. It measures the same things the cleaning-video algorithm measures, just aimed at a gallery instead of a feed. It will tell an institution what its visitors clicked on. It won't tell them what they actually thought standing in front of the object, any more than my scroll history tells anyone what I actually find beautiful.

Categorising what I am is not the same as understanding who I am. We've built most of the internet around the first one, efficiently, at scale, with a business model attached to every data point it collects. I think we're only starting to notice what that costs, the same way you only notice a windbreak hut is rare once you've actually stood inside one and realised how long it had been since you'd found a space like it.