THE PRECISE SOURCE OF FACEBOOK’S power is algorithms. That’s a concept repeated dutifully in nearly every story about the tech giants, yet it remains fuzzy at best to users of those sites. From the moment of the algorithm’s invention, it was possible to see its power, its revolutionary potential. The algorithm was developed in order to automate thinking, to remove difficult decisions from the hands of humans, to settle contentious debates. To understand the essence of the algorithm—and its utopian pretension—it’s necessary to travel back to its birthplace, the brain of one of history’s
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