The Algorithmic Life Is Not Worth Living

It’s Privacy Week here at CoinDesk, and we’ve been diving into a variety of technological and legal angles on the consequences of digital surveillance. Anxiety about the rise of omnipresent snooping can often feel like an academic matter of principle, or a series of warnings about important but uncommon edge cases: the battered spouse being stalked with malware, the dissident tracked and murdered by a government, the consumer with legal but socially marginalized tastes. These scenarios of privacy compromise have serious implications, of course, for those who fall victim and for every single one of us.

But the most widespread use of digital surveillance can seem far more mundane than these headline examples, while being potentially vastly more insidious.

This article is part of CoinDesk's Privacy Week series.

Algorithmic content targeting is the foundation of omnipresent information businesses like Google and Facebook, and it affects you every moment you’re online. It can make you less informed, less unique, less thoughtful and less interesting, so subtly you don’t even notice.

Harvard researcher Shoshana Zuboff describes the impact of algorithmic targeting as “the privatization of the division of learning.” We have increasingly handed over our decisions about everything to pattern-recognition software, she argues. It guides our interactions with social media, dating sites, search engines, programmatic advertising and content feeds – and it’s built almost entirely on models of past human behavior. At its structural root, it is hostile to novelty, innovation and independence. And its pioneers have benefitted hugely from it – according to Zuboff, Google now has a “world-historical concentration of knowledge and power.”

I have a slightly snappier name for this than Zuboff: the Algorithmic Loop. Like most loops, it is easy to get trapped in because it harvests our preferences, then uses that data to keep us hooked – and take control. Sure it shows us prospective dates or movie titles or news blurbs that it knows we’re likely to click. But those suggestions in turn shape our desire for the next thing we consume.

The algorithmic loop, in short, doesn’t just predict our tastes, attitudes and beliefs, it creates them. And because it shapes them based on only what it already knows and can understand, it is making us less creative and less individual in ways that we have barely begun to understand.

Over time, the individual and collective effects may prove devastating.

Lowest common denominator

How is the algorithmic loop narrowing the range of human thought and creativity?