But I’m not complaining! Unlike the algorithms used by Amazon (which are sneaky) or Facebook (which abetted the spread of fake news), Instagram’s Explore feature strikes me as refreshingly non-sinister. It provides curated randomness — a category that can exist only in an era of algorithms. The distance between what I like and what Instagram thinks I might like is oceanic, preposterous, deranged. And yet the algorithm is not wrong. I press the “like” button on a picture of my friend, and the Explore page shows me albino crocodiles. I comment on a cute dog, and the Explore page offers circus contortionists. Suddenly I like those things, too. Lurking inside my bland device is a fire hose of peculiarity that I can blast open whenever I choose.

The fire hose introduced me, for example, to Giulianna Maria Bosco (@giuliannaa), who is a 19-year-old college sophomore with a hobby of applying trompe l’oeil makeup that appears to slice her face in half on a diagonal axis and flip one half upside down. What figment of the algorithm brought Bosco to my Explore page? I dunno. But there she was one night, with a jagged line running across her face, splitting it in two, an eyebrow drawn on her left cheek, and an inverted nose and mouth rendered in eyeliner on her forehead. Two faces were laid atop one, and both were looking back at me, saying something like: “There are so many ways to be yourself in the world. Here is one of them.”

Using the same tools and creams I keep in my medicine cabinet, Bosco had retrofitted her face into an object with 180-degree rotational symmetry, which meant that it looked the same right side up as it did upside down. (Other items with this form of symmetry include parallelograms, the letter Z, and the New York Times crossword puzzle.) Her makeup was elaborate, and her features were expressionless; the face staring into the camera was as neutral as an Advil tablet. Bosco amazed me.

The algorithm sensed my excitement. When I went back to the Explore page, it was populated with images of other young makeup artists who had executed the two-face look on themselves. (The look, it turns out, is a thing.) It wasn’t merely the technical chops of the makeup artists that thrilled me, but the intensity and idiosyncrasy of their self-expression. Broadcasting the weird and obscure parts of your character has not historically been a favorite pastime of teenagers, but the internet has rendered that version of adolescence obsolete. In Bosco’s world, trying too hard is not a sign of loserdom but a testament to focus. In this world, a person can spend seven hours alone in her room applying liquid latex over her eyebrows to a reception of 2,700 comments saying “Awesome!” in a variety of languages.