Our optimization culture poses a paradox. We believe we have free will and are autonomous agents, yet many feel a sense of unease, almost as if we are being programmed but do not quite know how or by whom. Jack Dorsey (2024), the former CEO of Twitter, said as much at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2024, noting that ‘the free speech debate is a complete distraction’ right now and suggesting that ‘we are being programmed … through these [algorithmic] discovery mechanisms’.

We are immersed in a culture where we feed on an information diet produced exclusively for us based on a mixture of what we say we are interested in, which prompts the algorithms to find a cluster of like-minded others to serve us with content to keep us engaged. This incrementally sharpens the simplified ‘pictures in our heads’ that Walter Lippmann (1965) thought we used to organize our political lives.

An overarching concern with this book is the question of how humans remain algorithmic problems under the terms of an algorithmic contract that provides countless pressures to submit to algorithmic classification. Algorithms are designed to make users more predictable, improving daily in their ability to do so, while at the same time offering users the illusion of autonomy through a ‘new abstracted identity’ that relieves the anxiety of a messy, pluralistic world.