Choosing From a Menu You Didn't Write: The Algorithm and Free Will.
You're scrolling through Instagram, and after sharing a few cat memes to your friends, your feed becomes a relentless stream of cats dancing on shitty music videos. Or maybe YouTube, after one video on how to fix a leaky faucet, decides you are now a full-time plumber. The algorithm’s suggestions are so eerily specific, so perfectly targeted, that they prompt the modern, slightly paranoid question: Is it controlling me? The debate about social media algorithms usually gets stuck between two unsatisfying extremes. On one side, there's the view of Hard Determinism that we are all just puppets, and the algorithm is pulling our strings. Our past clicks create a data trail that dictates what we see next, which in turn dictates our future clicks in an endless, unbreakable loop. Choice is an illusion. On the other side is Libertarian Free Will that this is all nonsense. I am a sovereign individual. I can close the app anytime. The algorithm merely makes suggestions , I am the one who ...