Life in the Algorithm

But this internecine internet feud is eclipsed, in Lorenz’s report­ing, by a shadow thesis of which she seems largely unaware: that the engine for this corporate revolution—this rerouting of business models and marketing campaigns from “connection” to “content creation”—has consistently been white women. White women producers (as mommy bloggers, My... See more

To imagine one’s recommendations as wholesale “generic,” rather than generic to one’s demographic, is a step stranger. It may be a tacit acknowledgment of one’s own claim to cultural domi­nance—the world might look flat if you are looking at it from above—or a concession to one’s own frictionless passage through space, online and off. A U.S. passpo... See more

Take fiction. Chayka writes, “Young writers often find ways to cultivate public presences online even before they enter MFA programs, on Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok. They subject their voices to the force of social media flattening.” What could this mean? Did young writers—say, before 2006—have autonomous voices, independent of social norms, econ... See more

None of this is strictly true, but it’s all become truism.

t’s said to be quite powerful. I won’t pretend to know how it works—my understanding is that they don’t know either, which is a clever alibi. I hear that it’s a specter haunting our world. In fact, I hear that it knows that specters haunt worlds (but only at the start of an essay), which could be another way of saying that it has an uncanny grasp o... See more