In the preface of his famous Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman produces a manifesto in defence of individual autonomy. The poem represents an insistence on being present to the wonders of the world, to approach others with openness and humility, and to question orthodoxy. He instructs readers to ‘dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem’ (Whitman 1855). This mythologizing of individualism is central to the American ethos. It is also part of what makes the algorithmic contract valid in the eyes of American people.

In many ways, the culture of Silicon Valley is consistent with the view of the American Romantics. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the son of Puritan clergy, broke from the collaborative, civic minded view of the Massachusetts Puritans. He was a champion of individualism over communitarianism. Individuals, for Emerson, must take care to not succumb to the conformity of groupthink, but rather to ‘insist on yourself ‘. (Emerson 1841, 51). This view differed from the traditional views of Puritan pastors like Ezra Ripley, who objected to this core principle of ‘self-reliance’: ‘Who could live alone and independent? Who but some disgusted hermit or half-crazy enthusiast will say to society, I have no need of thee; I am under no obligation to my fellow-men?’ (Fuhrer 2014, 28).

The American transcendentalist idea constitutes a radical departure from viewing the self primarily as part of a social order. Emerson's denunciation of community norms can seem anarchist at times, as when he declares in ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of its members‘(Emerson 1841, 14).