125,000 people read my post. Then it disappeared.

Michel Heitzmann

© Michel Heitzmann

I lived in Romania for a few years in my thirties. Every March 1st, people give each other these little tokens called mărțișoare. Tiny flowers tied to a twisted red and white cord. Street vendors selling them, women wearing them pinned to their coats, kids handing them out at school. It marks the first day of spring.

I hadn’t thought about it in years. Maybe 25.

Then one morning my phone told me it was Mărțișor. I opened an app. It has this cultural calendar thing that tells you what’s happening in the world beyond the usual news cycle. And there it was. March 1st. And it hit me — not as information. As memory.

I wrote about it. Posted it on Reddit. Went to bed.

By morning it had 50,000 views.

By the time it was removed it had 125,000.

810 people had upvoted it. 58 had commented. 163 had shared it. The moderators decided it was self-promotion. A post about a Romanian spring tradition I’d forgotten for 25 years. Self-promotion.

Here’s the thing I keep thinking about.

The post wasn’t about an app. It was about what disappears without you noticing. A tradition. A memory. The specific feeling of seeing something small and beautiful pinned to a stranger’s coat on a cold March morning in Bucharest. The algorithm had decided that wasn’t worth showing me for 25 years. I only found out it still existed by accident.

And then a different algorithm decided my rediscovery of it was suspicious.

Ephemeral successful author. Who cares. Nemo in the Matrix.

But my ephemeral spike shows something. The world is at the mercy of algorithms. 125,000 people recognized something in a memory about a tradition they’d never heard of, and a machine decided that was dangerous. We are not even aware of what is being quietly taken from us.

That is the urgency.

The post is gone. The memory isn’t. Neither is the learning.