The common carriage standard imposed clear, consistent guidelines on telecommunications companies. They had to transmit messages without prejudice and without violating the confidentiality of their contents.

The design metaphors that soon emerged—feed, stream, loop, scroll—stressed flux and fluidity. Nothing lasts, they suggested. Nothing has more than passing interest.

Iris Murdoch, in her 1957 essay “Metaphysics and Ethics,” put it expansively: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”

“We imagine most things before we experience them,” and our preconceptions “govern deeply the whole process of perception.”

The power of the feed algorithm doesn’t lie in the meaning of the messages it delivers—the algorithm knows nothing of meaning—but rather in its ability to match messages to individuals’ emotional triggers. It automates the striking of responsive chords.

A computer network exists to maximize the speed of data transfer and processing, to shorten the delay between input and output. The more we rely on computers to mediate what we say and see and think about, the more we have to adapt our thought, speech, and behavior to their characteristics and requirements.

Even if semantic considerations are irrelevant to their calculations, the algorithms used to sort and channel information regulate what content is transmitted, the form it takes, and how it’s interpreted. They influence meaning both directly (by selecting the information people see) and indirectly (by promoting certain forms of expression and

The “content of the self”—again, Cooley’s wording is prescient—varies “indefinitely with particular temperaments and environments.”8 The “I” is contextual; it changes as situations change.

A myth provides a readymade context for quickly interpreting new information as it flows chaotically around us. It provides the distracted System 1 thinker with an all-encompassing framework for intuitive sense-making.