This Doesn't Fit The Algorithm...Yet

An essay for the new year.

The modern world has perfected the art of mistaking its own tools for gods. We build mechanisms that sort, rank, and distribute our desires, and then we bow before the very machinery we have fashioned. Often one may have heard of "the algorithm." Indeed, an invisible liturgy of metrics and momentum has become the latest idol enthroned in the digital temple. It promises revelation, visibility, and the fleeting salvation of virality. But like all idols, it demands sacrifice: attention, conformity, and the slow erosion of memory.

Jon Del Arroz proudly remarked that Fandom Pulse “doesn’t follow the algorithm,” he inadvertently named a deeper truth. The problem is not that certain voices fail to conform to the algorithm’s demands. The problem is that the algorithm has become the standard by which we judge the worth of speech at all. We have allowed a machine—opaque, unaccountable, and fundamentally uninterested in truth—to determine what deserves to be heard.

Naturally, Christians confess that the only algorithm that ultimately matters: the one Jesus Christ assigns to humanity. Christ does not rank us by engagement metrics or trend lines. His economy is not one of scarcity but of gift. His visibility is not granted to the loudest of us but to the least of us. The kingdom of God does not operate on the logic of amplification but on the logic of incarnation: the Word becomes flesh in obscurity, not in the trending tab on X.

Not only is the algorithm inadequate, it is idolatrous. It tempts us to believe that meaning is downstream from momentum, that truth is validated by reach, and that the future belongs to whatever the machine elevates today. But the Christian imagination is trained by a different story, one in which the stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone, and the mustard seed becomes the tree.

An old mentor of mine, Pastor Rich Bledsoe, has often spoken of the strange phenomenon of re‑remembering: the way cultures forget their own prototypes until a later crisis forces its retrieval. He once pointed to Paul Harvey, one of the most influential and widely heard radio broadcasters in American history as an example. Harvey was a man whose voice shaped the moral imagination of millions, yet who slipped from cultural memory because, at the time, he did not fit the emerging algorithm of political media. Harvey’s broadcasts were not optimized for outrage or acceleration; they were slow, moral narratives rooted in a vision of the good that could not be reduced to a series of sound bytes. Only after his death did people begin to excavate his influence.

The point here is that even if someone's words or influence do not register within the current cultural consciousness, that doesn't meant they will remain that way. This is why it is not only permissible but necessary to write things without regard to a mainstream algorithm. The most important words are often the ones that seem irrelevant to the present moment, but function as seeds planted in the soil, awaiting a season that no man can predict.

To write outside the algorithm is to refuse the tyranny of immediacy and to trust that truth has a longer half‑life than virality. It is to believe that the Holy Spirit, not the man-made machine, governs the future.

So let Fandom Pulse fail the algorithm. Let it refuse the liturgy of trend lines and engagement metrics. Let it speak with the kind of voice that may not be heard today but will be remembered tomorrow, when the idols of the present have crumbled, and the only algorithm that remains is the one written by Christ.

In the end, the algorithm will forget us. But Christ will not.

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