How much of our lives do we really want 'wrapped' – or 'unwrapped'?
As Spotify Wrapped bombarded feeds this week, it might be time to ask: how much of our online habits do we actually want to share with others?
By Ben Jhoty
EARLIER THIS WEEK I caught wind that Spotify Wrapped was imminent. The news caused a reflexive tug of anxiety in my stomach. I was fearful of what the annual snapshot of my listening habits might reveal – I hammered a lot of Tina Turner’s ‘Private Dancer’ back in March, after going to the musical with my wife.
To make matters worse, in one of our daily editorial meetings this week, we made predictions on what artists would feature in our respective ‘Wrappeds’. Fortunately, as I share my account with my wife, I didn’t have to share that Tina, the ’80s power ballad queen, would likely top my Wrapped. I also had the cover of my daughter’s listening tastes and predicted, correctly as it turned out, that her and my wife’s musical tastes would muscle Tina out of my account’s top 5 – if you’re interested Beyonce was the no.1 artist and ‘BroZone’s Back’ from the Trolls Band Together soundtrack, was the third most streamed song.
Spotify Wrapped represents a God-tier level of marketing genius, allowing users to share their listening habits on social media and, in the process, add to our carefully constructed online personas. Many people will post with no commentary – a seemingly unvarnished totem to their inner workings. Others will offer some wry commentary on the results of their Wrappeds – “No surprises here. I smashed ‘Not like us’ in July . . . Fuck Drake!”. And still others will valiantly attempt to own their inner dork, which is what I would have done with Tina – “Love’s got everything to do with it, folks”.
Self-effacing irony is, of course, the default language of social media, helping insulate us from trolling, while acting as a kind of virtual pole vault that enables many of us to catapult over self-conscious or introspective impulses that may otherwise have prevented us from posting in the first place. But regardless of how you choose to package it, a Spotify Wrapped post in your Insta stories is another content brick in the edifice that is your digital persona, one that despite all your hard work, likely barely figures in the thoughts of your audience, who are too busy curating their own digital profiles. It’s a great time to be alive.
The beauty of Spotify Wrapped is that it is largely benign – despite the potential to be outed as a Tina Turner disciple, or in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s case, a wannabe hipster. But given its colossal success, you do have to wonder if other platforms might one day offer their own annual snapshots of their users’ behaviour and what the implications of such a move would be. I suspect it be would rather cataclysmic.
The reason for my trepidation is that a broader annual snapshot of our online behaviour, taking in Google search, online shopping, TikTok viewing, and well, I’ll just say it, Pornhub habits, would be far more revealing of who we are. In many cases, it would likely reveal an identify far removed from both our public persona and our meticulously crafted social media avatar.
Indeed, not only would we not wish to share this information, many of us wouldn’t be in a hurry to face up to it ourselves. Because although we instinctively know what we look at on our commutes and in the privacy of our living rooms, having it presented to us in a slickly produced (props to Spotify here) package, could be confronting.
On some platforms, particularly TikTok and META, you can already guess what your annual snapshot would look like because of what the algorithms are constantly serving you, based on your previous viewing habits. I am currently mired in a TikTok dungeon with no light, in which every third video is about the spike in UAP sightings (which may or may not be related to the recent leap in AI video capabilities) and the findings of the recent congressional hearing on US government cover-ups of this phenomena.
I have to tell you, I cannot look away and while I sometimes try to search other, less crackpotty stuff, like Zion Williamson’s college highlights’, for example, I invariably find myself back in the UAP hole, with occasional incursions by @lyricmedeiros – if you don’t know who that is, I would advise against searching for her, as she is an unkillable digital zombie.
On facebook, meanwhile, I am increasingly being served Lion vs Tiger fights, mongooses vs Cobras and my new favourite, domestic cats vs Cobras – let me just say, cats don’t play, feline reflexes rival those of a mum watching a toddler eat jelly on a new Persian rug. On Instagram, meanwhile, the past two weeks has seen a deluge of couples’ content: ‘when he does this or that’, when you’re this but she’s that’. It’s nauseating stuff that appears to have my eyeballs under lock and key.
While I could argue that the algorithm knows me too well, or blame it for my viewing habits, unfortunately all it does is hold up a digital mirror to my inner self and my impulses. The algorithm didn’t conclude that I have a predilection for voyeuristic inter-species combat. It was I, who one day innocently looked at a video – no doubt served to me because I’d shown a previous liking for unsanctioned street-fight content – for a fraction of a second too long and am now paying the price.
Of course, none of this stuff is particularly edifying. Nor is it productive. I could have written a screenplay in the time I’ve spent looking at this garbage – I wish I had. More to the point, I would be mortified to share any of it on my social media accounts (though it’s weirdly liberating to write about it here!). It is too private, for one. More importantly, it would largely undermine the self-deprecating-nice guy-who-likes-basketball-movies-and-travel persona I’ve spent the past decade crafting. Not even my wife knows I watch this stuff and, truth be told, I’m not about to tell her (she doesn’t read Esquire). Equally, I don’t know what she’s looking at on her phone, as she sits across from me on the couch each night and not sure I want to find out.
As things stand, Google already reveals annual search results for the platform as a whole, which can be revealing. In 2023, NFL player Davar Hamlin, who made headlines when he suffered a cardiac arrest and collapsed on-field, was the most searched person. He was followed by actor Jeremy Renner, who suffered a serious snowplough accident. It appears we can’t resist misfortune that impacts even semi-famous people. I’ll wager that Taylor Swift will be the most searched person this year but based on last year’s results and our predilection for celeb health issues, James Van Der Beek, who recently revealed he’s suffering bowel cancer, could be a dark horse for the top spot.
As interesting and insightful as these collective results are, though, they’re damning of us as a species, rather than as individuals. And while it’s unlikely the day will come when our most private impulses are being offered up to us as content fodder, as they are with Spotify Wrapped, it’s possible they may get harvested as data or are hacked and used for nefarious purposes.
For now, though, we are largely safe from having to share or confront who we really are in the bottomless pit of our handheld digital devices, where no one’s watching and no one can judge us. No one, that is, except the all-seeing algorithm, the only true witness to our online lives, and to the person most of us would rather keep under wraps.
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