Let's Just Admit it: The Algorithms Are Broken

Digital platforms take away agency from the business owners, pressuring them to follow in lockstep rather than pursue their own creative whims.

In a 2014 post on a blog run by Microsoft Research, a scholar named Christian Sandvig coined the term “corrupt personalization” to describe such flawed recommendations as the manipulative Netflix movie thumbnails and homogenous Spotify playlists. “Corrupt personalization is the process by which your attention is drawn to interests that are not your

attracting the algorithm’s attention caused an overflow.

Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentive