Sublime

Addiction allows companies to see how embedded they are into people’s daily lives,

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

The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.

There was a disingenuousness to this theater; I see that clearly now. I wanted it both ways: to be the No Logo girl (the face of an emerging anti-capitalist movement) and to deny that I cared a bit about building a brand.

We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be.

Since tech platforms rarely address the enormity of the social changes they have caused, preferring to deemphasize their own power, it surprised me that he admitted Airbnb had an effect not just on how people travel, but on where they go, actively influencing the destination.