Why We Throw the Cucumber: Algorithms, Envy, and Finding Tech Freedom

The crisp October air has finally settled in, painting the local hiking trails in brilliant shades of gold, rust, and crimson. This morning, after a solid night's sleep and a hearty breakfast featuring the last stubborn tomatoes from my fabric grow bag garden, I sat down at my Yamaha digital piano. There is something profoundly grounding about pressing the keys and feeling the physical vibration of the chords. It’s a stark contrast to the digital worlds I’ve inhabited. Out in nature or making music, the feedback loops are natural and honest.

But when I sit down at my desk with my M4 Mac Mini and curved monitor, the systems are designed entirely differently. If you’ve spent any time online, you’ve probably seen the famous 2003 video of the capuchin monkeys. Two monkeys side by side do a task. One gets a grape; the other gets a cucumber. The one with the cucumber loses her mind and throws it back at the researcher. For years, we were told this was proof that primates have a built-in sense of justice—a tiny Wall Street protest in a cage.

My university days studying digital electronics taught me to look for the logic gates behind every behavior, a trait that served me well from my days as a Vietnam-era Army computer repairman and a commercial pilot, all the way up to sitting in corner offices as a CTO or VP. And the actual science here tells a much more complicated story. A 2024 meta-analysis looking at over 60,000 observations found no consistent evidence that animals reject a reward just because someone else got a better one. What the data actually shows is disappointment. If you just leave a bowl of grapes visible, the monkey still gets mad about the cucumber. It’s not a moral manifesto for fairness—it’s the agonizing frustration of seeing the grape and realizing you only have a cucumber.

The human evidence is even more telling. Psychologists note that toddlers hate a split that leaves them behind, but they rarely object when they are the ones getting the better deal. We mostly practice fairness against our own loss.

This brings me to my work today as a Liberation Technologist. We are living in a digital architecture that leaves the bowl of grapes on the table for everyone to see. Social media algorithms, driven by engagement optimization, constantly show us what everyone else has—the perfect vacations, the incredible wealth, the supposedly flawless lives. These platforms operate as contested infrastructures that leverage personalized virality to monopolize our attention. They strip away our ignorance and turn that monkey-like reflex of comparison into a permanent, exhausting mood of public life.

When I first started writing code decades ago, we didn't fully grasp how these platforms would eventually exploit human neurobiology. Today, corporate algorithms weaponize our status anxieties to drive engagement, trapping us in a digital double bind where participating in the modern economy means subjecting ourselves to a surveillance panopticon. Everyone feels like they are the one getting the cucumber, and everyone is mad.

But we have agency here, fellow travelers. As Liberation Technologists, we advocate for trauma-informed design and decentralized networks—like the AT Protocol or Nostr—that distribute control and don't rely on outrage to function. We can build and choose tools that respect our biological limits, offering digital sanctuaries where we can connect and organize without the hyper-arousal of surveillance capitalism.

We don't have to participate in the rage machine. We can choose to step back, prioritize our health, cook a real meal, and engage in everyday acts of algorithmic resistance. Throwing the cucumber doesn't get you a grape; it just leaves you with nothing. Let's focus our energy on building systems—and lives—that nourish us instead.