Giuliano da Empoli is a Swiss-Italian novelist, political essayist, and professor at Paris’s Sciences Po. He writes about how political forces rise to power and how manipulation of public discourse happens. And he has a message for you: you are being manipulated by algorithms. We are being manipulated by algorithms.
Read the headline of this post again: I Have Not Been Manipulated by Algorithms, but You Have.
Doesn’t sound right, does it? Those being manipulated are always somebody else. They. You. Never we or I. So the first step is to accept that I, too, am being manipulated. When we accept that, we can start thinking about what to do about it.
I am being manipulated by algorithms. My taste in music. My knowledge about the world. My understanding of how the world works. This is not a conspiracy theory—I am not being singled out and fed something specific to move in some certain direction. It’s just that the way the online world works—the algorithms it runs on—will bring me some sorts of information and not other sorts of information.
What do I do with this insight? First, I will stop pointing fingers and doing algo-shaming on others. Next, I will make more efforts to seek information outside of online sources. I’ll tell you when I find something—watch this space.
You don’t have to do anything, because surely you see through the algorithms. Or do you?
