The Algorithm and the Barrel: Diogenes in the Age of Attention

In 1976, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote that, “[w]ell-behaved women seldom make history.” While her original intention was to highlight how the historical record overlooks women who conform to the expectations of their time, it has since been taken up as a rebellious mantra, one that supports bucking the patriarchal norms that expect women to, for lack of a better word, behave. In its original context, it referred to women who adhered to Puritan social norms, but I have more often heard it used as a broader call to resist and disrupt conformity. In its widest interpretation, it becomes a claim about history itself: that change rarely comes from compliance, and that progress tends to belong to those willing to upset a few apple carts.

The reason I start with that quote here is that it kept coming to mind over the past week as I read Diogenes: The Rebellious Life and Revolutionary Philosophy of the Original Cynic. This book, part biography, part theoretical exploration, provides the reader with a wonderful introduction to the works of the (in)famous thinker, his brand of Cynicism, and his talent for annoying the ever-loving hell out of almost everyone he encountered. It is this latter quality — his refusal to recognize the conventions of his time as anything other than arbitrary — that may well explain why we still know his name. And while he was most certainly not a woman (and I feel no small degree of discomfort about deploying Ulrich’s quote when talking about a man), the underlying idea still feels intact: that to be remembered, one often has to challenge the powerful, whether those powers are people or systems, and this is often noisy.

Nothing symbolizes this more than Diogenes’ legendary encounter with Alexander the Great. According to accounts from the 3rd century CE (somewhat confusingly written by another man also called Diogenes), Alexander visited Corinth, where Diogenes was living. Intrigued by the philosopher’s reputation for rejecting wealth, status, and convention, Alexander sought him out and found him resting in the sun. Introducing himself, Alexander asked if there was anything he could do for him. At this point, he was already the most powerful man in Greece and, therefore, capable of granting almost any desire Diogenes might reasonably have had. Diogenes, however, was unimpressed. He simply replied: “Yes — stand out of my light.”

Alexander is said to have been struck by the answer. That this man, rather than asking for wealth, property, slaves, or power, should instead request only the return of sunlight was reportedly astonishing to him. Rather than taking offense, Alexander is said to have later remarked that if he were not Alexander, he would choose to be Diogenes.

Whether this encounter took place is difficult to say. The account we have was written several hundred years after both men’s deaths. Yet, whether factual or not, it remains the clearest symbol of Diogenes’ philosophy: a rejection of unnecessary desire, a commitment to self-sufficiency, and a willingness to speak truth to power. In another equally famous exchange (and one that is far more likely to have historical grounding), when Plato defined a human being as a “featherless biped,” Diogenes allegedly arrived at one of Plato’s lectures with a plucked chicken and declared (depending on the translation), “This is Plato’s man!”

While these are, arguably, two of the most iconic interactions Diogenes had with those around him, they are by far not the only ones. Diogenes consistently found ways to, if one wants to be polite, challenge assumptions (and if one wants to be less polite, consistently be a bit of a dick.)

All this is to say that Diogenes was rarely well behaved, and he most certainly made history.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: this is all rather interesting (and I would encourage anyone interested in philosophy to spend more time with Diogenes), but why does this matter right now?

One way to answer that is to place Diogenes not in the ancient world, but in the modern world of attention economics. We tend to think of disruptive figures — cultural, political, or digital — as people who break systems. Yet much of what appears disruptive today is, in practice, faithful to the systems in which it operates. The most successful “rebels” of the digital age are those who have learned, consciously or not, to optimize themselves for the logic of the algorithm or the economy.

Take, for instance, the ecosystem shaped by platforms such as YouTube. Its recommendation systems reward watch time, engagement, and retention above all else. Within that framework, creators who appear outrageous, extravagant, or rule-breaking often thrive; not because they are resisting the system, but because they are calibrated to it. The more extreme the gesture, the more efficiently it converts into clicks; the more legible the spectacle, the more reliably it circulates.

This is where the modern “Diogenes figure” becomes interesting. Contemporary attention economies produce a corrupted echo of Cynicism: the creator who appears to reject norms, stages acts of excess or refusal, and claims to exist outside convention. Yet this rejection is frequently itself a performance that the system not only tolerates but actively amplifies.

Few figures illustrate this tension more clearly than large-scale content creators such as MrBeast. On the surface, his videos often appear to escalate beyond rational limits: vast sums of money given away, elaborate physical challenges, and increasingly cinematic production values. There is a surface narrative of disruption: “no one has done this before,” “this breaks the internet,” or “this is bigger than anything else on the platform.” But this is precisely the point. The content is not outside the algorithm; it is shaped by it. It is engineered for retention, shareability, and the precise signals platforms reward.

Seen this way, the “radical” gesture is not Diogenes lying in the sun and refusing Alexander’s offer. It is closer to Diogenes’ learning that the loudest provocation gathers the biggest crowd, and then refining that provocation until it becomes an optimized spectacle. The detail matters here, and Diogenes may well have enjoyed the attention his antics generated from the ancient crowds. But what matters more is not his personal psychology, but the ideas he espoused: that value systems are arbitrary, and that refusal, not performance, is what exposes them.

When Diogenes disrupts Plato’s lecture with a plucked chicken or tells Alexander to move, he is not attempting to win within an attention system; he is exposing the system itself as arbitrary. The discomfort he produces is not aesthetic but philosophical. And crucially, it resists measurement. There is no metric that can translate his actions into success, because he is not operating within a framework that rewards him for success in the first place. Indeed, as we saw with Alexander, he actively avoided what many would consider rewards.

By contrast, the contemporary attention economy absorbs even the appearance of refusal and converts it into a monetizable form. The algorithm does not care whether you are praising or mocking it, so long as you are engaging with it. This produces a strange inversion: the more something resembles Diogenic rebellion — transgression, refusal, anti-establishment performance — the more easily it is captured by the system it seems to oppose.

The consequence is that “making history” today can look less like stepping outside a system and more like mastering its internal logic. The figures who dominate digital culture are not necessarily those who reject the rules, but those who understand them most intuitively. In that sense, the OG Diogenes becomes less a model for spectacle and more a correction to it. He reminds us that refusal is not simply about being louder, more extreme, or more visible. It is, at least in principle, about withholding participation in the economy that turns attention itself into value.

Now, is it still possible to withhold? That is a question. But I like to think that Diogenes, confronted with a world so thoroughly structured around visibility, optimization, and capture, would not adapt quietly to it. If anything, I suspect he would be less well behaved than ever, and that might still be the most honest response available.