The Algorithm in the House

On or about December 2010 human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into the street, and noticed that the flow of traffic had reorganized itself so that it was all traveling one way. But a change there was, nevertheless. In that year Facebook introduced its EdgeRank algorithm, which selected which articles a user would encounter in their feed based upon three factors: user affinity (the relationship and proximity of the content of the user), content weight (whether or not the user hit the like button), and a time-based decay parameter (new posts rise, older posts sink). This simplified algorithm would soon be replaced by more sophisticated algorithms powered by machine learning, capable of weighting tens of thousands of factors. “The algorithm” is now ubiquitous, whether you’re shopping for a lamp or for a date, deciding which song to listen to next or which TikTok video to watch. The algorithm is the universal prosthesis of our mediated modernity, as newspapers and the telegraph were for the nineteenth century and movies, radio, and television were for the twentieth.