We are now porous not only to the collective ambience of human
thought, but also to something half-human, something sub-human: It is
neither you nor I deciding which of the photographs and poems I post
on my Instagram you get to see; the algorithm that decides for you is
not sentient in the sense that you and I are. It was once composed in
code by human hands moved by human minds, and now it steers the bottom
line of a human-governed company, but at that moment, that inflection
point where it metes out your allotment of cultural material, it is
pure machine — an automaton of variables, not one of them visible to
you, not one controllable, together shaping what truth and beauty may
appear before you, feeding what you may think about today and dream
about tonight...