What algorithms want

Here’s another brief excerptfrom my new essay, “The Manipulators: Facebook’s Social Engineering Project,” in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

We have had a hard time thinking clearly about companies like Google and Facebook because we have never before had to deal with companies like Google and Facebook. They are something new in the world, and they don’t fit neatly into our existing legal and cultural templates. Because they operate at such unimaginable magnitude, carrying out millions of inf...