Serena Malcolm

How do you beat the algorithm?
How do you fight a reflection that’s been distorted?
Pixelated by cyber forces that convince our daughters that they’re not enough?
How do you deflect the million voices that affect their choices and drown out us telling them it’s too much?
My daughter tells me she’s ugly,
Doesn’t hear me when I tell her she’s a queen,
A beauty and a mind that most could only dream,
She tells me she’s not seen,
Because that’s what they tell her on her screen,
How do you fight an algorithm that can break a girl’s dream without breaking a sweat?
The doom scroll of trolls that make my baby regret being born when she hasn’t even lived yet.
And we tell ourselves that it’s okay,
That they’ll grow and they’ll learn their worth some way,
That this social media cage will let them free someday,
But isn’t that a pipe dream?
There are two wolves to feed and their For You page and their News Feed is seed for the wrong one,
Fodder for the bad one,
Ammo for the mad one,
And there’s nothing to be done,
Zuckerberg and Musk and Bytedance have won,
Because how do you fight an algorithm that already knows you from scroll one?
The Art of War by Sun is just one of a million that taught this enemy its strategy,
Large language modelled effigies of corrupt billionaires who happily make my daughter collateral screed in their path to fatted greed,
How do you fight an algorithm that would see our children hollowed out and left to bleed?
I don’t know.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know what they need.
And the kicker is, I can’t exactly trust the answer ChatGPT would give me.