One of the troubling things about modern life is the fact that so many of our ordinary decisions are manipulated by vested interests and opaque forces. This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon, we have always been easily swayed – by the slick advertisers of Madison Avenue, the chocolate bars placed strategically at checkouts, the newspapers screaming what should alarm us the most today.
But the social media age we are living in today makes that sort of manipulation seem like child’s play. The algorithms that shape contemporary reality are far more pervasive, and far more of a health hazard, than any 30-second TV ad spot. They’re designed to make us anxious and angry, get us hooked, spy on us, mine our data and monetise us, as Harvard academic Soshana Zuboff laid bare in her chilling monograph on surveillance capitalism.
