What does ‘personalized’ let you do?

Open YouTube in a fresh, signed-out desktop browser, and the Home page is nearly empty. It invites you to search or start watching so YouTube can build you a feed. Pause watch history and Home tells you what turning it back on would do: show you videos “tailored to your interests.” It gives you two buttons. One of them says “Leave history off.”

I’ve left YouTube, and as much of Google as I can, blind to my “history” for a while now. It has a lot of good “less is more” effects, some of them subtle. With history still off today, a search for bicycle tire repair got me a list of videos about fixing a flat. Search answered the question I asked, when I asked it. The Home feed wants to give me things I haven’t asked for, based on what it thinks it knows and can infer from any “history” I share with it. I never wanted that, and I never liked the “personalized” results.

What the switch controls

YouTube’s help page says that if you have no substantial recent watch history and turn off collecting more, it removes features such as Home recommendations. Mind the condition. My test started with an empty history. Someone with years of history who only pauses it may get a different Home page; pausing and deleting are separate controls.¹

Other controls steer the recommendations. You can dismiss a suggestion or tell YouTube to stop recommending a channel, and YouTube says it may also draw on activity elsewhere in your Google Account. Each control changes something specific. The word “personalized” tells you almost nothing about which information goes in, how the next video gets picked, or how much of that choice you can take back.²

What the word lets us ask

In 1984, of all years, Ivan Illich borrowed Orwell’s Newspeak to go after the habit of treating speech as the transfer of information. He also coined “Uniquack” for words that wander out of technical fields into ordinary speech carrying more authority than precision. “Personalized” is a fine specimen. For YouTube it has an operational meaning: certain information goes in, and the selection or order of videos changes. In ordinary speech it suggests a service arranged around your assumed purposes. One label carries both meanings until someone asks what a particular switch does.³

Three years before that lecture, Illich and the other signers of a West German appeal — “Break Free from the Madhouse!” — went after the official language of security and growth. The stakes were very different from a video feed. What carries over is the habit of making a public word answer for what gets done in its name.⁴

For the algorithmic feed, the question is whether you can set a purpose, follow it, and stop when you have what you came for. On YouTube you can leave history off and still find out how to patch a tube. Home runs on a different arrangement. Anyone judging it should be able to say what you can ask it to do, what it infers about you, and what disappears when you say no.

Ask the same of any language model that is said to know what you want. Start with the controls and the choices they leave you. “Personalized” can wait until someone can account for those.

Notes

1. YouTube, “View, Delete, or Turn On or Off Watch History,” YouTube Help, accessed November 10, 2026. ↩︎
2. YouTube, “Manage Your Recommendations and Search Results,” YouTube Help, accessed November 10, 2026. ↩︎
3. Ivan Illich, “Newspeak and Uniquack in 1984,” 1984, written lecture, Acervus Illich. ↩︎
4. “Break Free from the Madhouse!,” collectively signed appeal, Whitsun 1981, Acervus Illich. ↩︎