In Berlin, Kyoto, and Reykjavík, I searched for coffee shops, and quickly scrolled through Yelp’s list, which was sorted by the cafés’ star rating—a reflection of how much the app’s other users had liked each spot.

While the obstruction of taste and the tactic of corrupt personalization may feel like individual problems—users must work harder to identify what they truly like—it also quickly scales up into massive social issues. When millions of consumers are subtly misled and thus ultimately fed what they consume, certain kinds of culture are choked off from

As I have pointed out with other forms of culture, online ubiquity has a way of denaturing its subject, wearing away its essence into something more easily consumable, or else simply causing it to be consumed until it is gone.