I Started Lying to My Smart TV. It's the Most Honest Thing I've Done All Year.

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Six months ago I discovered you can lie to a television and it will believe every word. My smart TV asks who's watching, and I've stopped answering honestly — some nights I'm a twenty-three-year-old horror fan, other nights deep into competitive knitting, and one memorable Tuesday, death metal. The algorithm has no idea what to do with me, and neither does my grandson.

For forty-six years I was extremely legible to systems — employers, insurers, my own CV, all of it trackable, predictable, correctly categorised. Retirement is the first period of my life where nobody needs to correctly predict me at all. So I've taken, at sixty-seven, to confusing a recommendation engine on principle, purely for my own amusement, and it has quietly, wordlessly conceded defeat.

Full story — nine nights, nine personas, and what finally broke the algorithm — is on Substack now.


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