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 freely chooses to click.

Neither of these positions feels quite right. The first is too bleak, denying our own agency. The second is too simplistic, ignoring the powerful, persuasive nature of the technology. The truth, as it often is, might lie in a more complicated, philosophical third way.

What if the relationship isn't one of puppet and master, but one of a diner and a very, very specific menu?

Ordering Off the Menu.

"free will" doesn't mean the magical ability to do literally anything at all (like suddenly deciding to fly). Instead, it means the freedom to act according to your own internal motivations and desires, without being actively coerced by an external force. If you want to raise your hand and you are physically able to, you have acted freely.

Now, let's apply this to the algorithm using our menu metaphor.

You sit down at a restaurant (Application'). The chef (the algorithm) has already decided what's available today. This menu is determined by many factors: your past orders (viewing history), what ingredients are popular (trending topics), and what the restaurant owner wants to sell (ad-friendly content). You cannot order a chicken burger at this vegan cafe. You cannot ask for a 1920s silent film when the kitchen is only equipped to make short, high-dopamine video essays. The menu is finite, and it was written before you arrived.

The waiter places this menu in front of you. You are still the one who chooses between the Lentil Burger and the Quinoa Salad. No one is holding a gun to your head. Based on your mood, your hunger, and your personal taste, you make a choice. You are acting freely according to your desires, within the constraints of the determined menu.

We feel like we are making choices, and we are. But we can only choose from the options presented to us. The algorithm doesn't force your click, but it masterfully sets the stage for it.

But Who Is the Chef?

Here is where the metaphor gets darker and more interesting. A chef at a normal restaurant might want to delight you, to offer a balanced meal, to expand your palate. The algorithm-chef has a different, singular goal, dictated by the restaurant's owner (the corporation), keep you in your seat ordering for as long as possible.

This chef doesn't care about your well-being or your intellectual growth. It only cares about engagement.

So, the menu it writes is not just limited, it's intensely persuasive. It notices you glanced at the salty fries, so it starts removing the salads from the menu. It brings you endless free samples of salty things. It learns your weaknesses and designs a menu that is almost impossible for you to resist. It creates a feedback loop where your desires are not just catered to, but actively cultivated and reinforced.

If the chef knows that a diet of pure salted caramel will keep you at the table for 18 hours a day, then salted caramel is all you will ever see on the menu again.

If an external force is not only setting the limits of your choice but is also actively shaping the desires on which you base that choice, how meaningful is your freedom?

Becoming a Discerning Diner

So, what are we to do? We live in a world of these algorithmic restaurants; we can't simply decide to stop eating.

The first step is to recognize the structure. It’s the simple, conscious acknowledgment that you are not wandering through an infinite library of all possible knowledge; you are sitting at a table reading a carefully curated menu. This act of recognition is itself an exercise of freedom. It moves you from being a passive consumer to a critical participant.

The real expression of freedom, then, might not be choosing an item from the menu, but questioning the menu itself. It means occasionally typing something into the search bar that has nothing to do with your recommendations. It means clicking on a channel with only 10 subscribers. It means asking, "What isn't on this menu, and why?"

Freedom, in a world of algorithms, is not the power to order whatever we want. Perhaps it's just the quiet, persistent awareness that we are all sitting in a restaurant, and asking the simple, powerful question: "Who's in the kitchen?