I get the impulse to recover a more democratic online world compared to the top-down dictates of Silicon Valley. But in seeking a more humane tech future, nostalgia is more hindrance than help; the alternatives will need to be legible to new generations weaned on social-media feeds.

Many insightful cultural theorists and strategists have written about this struggle: Kyle Chayka on the filterworld flattening culture, Matt Klein on cultural stasis amidst creative surplus, and Beth Bentley on meh-ification. The focus has generally been on how algorithms have warped contemporary culture.

As Peters writes, paraphrasing Franz Kafka, “Those who build new media to eliminate the spectral element between people only create more ample breeding grounds for the ghosts.”