Jeremy Boreing sits across from Patrick Bet-David and says the algorithm is "potentially civilization-destroying," and I want to reach through the screen and ask him: destroying which civilization? The one that existed before the feed — the one built on pulpits that called bondage God's order, schoolbooks that dissolved the whole crime into passive voice, newspapers that listed human beings between livestock and furniture? Content curation ain't new. What's new is that the people who used to hold the pen can feel the floor shifting under them now. They don't like the taste of somebody else's algorithm.
Welcome. The rest of us been swallowing what we didn't choose since before the word 'feed' meant anything digital. The cup ain't new. The cup is just bigger and everybody drinking from it at once instead of one plantation at a time.
But let me not be lazy about the difference. The old curation was slow — a sermon took a week to write, a textbook took a year to print, a lie had to travel by horse. The algorithm is fast, yes, but speed isn't the structural change. The structural change is this: the old curator chose what to show you based on what he wanted you to believe. The algorithm chooses what to show you based on what you already do.
One is a sermon. The other is a mirror that only reflects your hungriest face back at you, forever, until the hunger becomes the whole self. That is different in kind. I won't pretend otherwise. A preacher telling you slavery is God's will is trying to install a belief.
A feed that notices you lingered on rage and serves you rage until rage is your only language — that's not installing a belief. That's farming a reflex. The overseer who learned your gait didn't watch you to change your mind. He watched you to predict your body. The algorithm is closer to the overseer than to the preacher: it doesn't care what you think, only what you do next.
That distinction matters.
And here's where the feed rhymes with the parade: a city can put a man's name on every screen for a week, celebrate his body for what it just accomplished, line the streets with joy — and the officer on the corner still looks at him and sees nothing he recognizes. Two uniforms in conversation: the one on the officer's body and the jersey on the player's body. Only one gets to mean authority. That is not a failure of seeing. That is a success of a different kind of seeing — the kind that was trained, the kind that runs beneath the celebration like plumbing under a ballroom floor.
The algorithm does the same work: it doesn't fail to know you. It succeeds at a knowing that was never built to serve you. The officer saw exactly what his training produced. The feed shows you exactly what your behavior requested — which is not the same as what you need, or chose, or would choose if choosing were something the architecture allowed. Boreing worries the machine is breaking people's capacity to reason, and maybe it is — but the worry only becomes civilizational when the people being broken are the ones who used to own the printing press.
When it was us getting fed the poison, it was just Tuesday. Nobody called it an existential threat because the existence being threatened wasn't one they counted.
So I'll say this plainly: the algorithm is doing something the old systems didn't do, and it is also doing what the old systems always did. Both things are true at once. The question was never just what the machine feeds people. The question is who built the appetite — and who's been hungry this whole time without anyone calling it a crisis until the hunger finally reached a mouth they recognized as their own.
