Jeremy Boreing sat for three hours on PBD Podcast 819 and delivered, among other things, the phrase "civilization-destroying" to describe what algorithmic feeds are doing to the American mind. It is the kind of phrase a man uses when he means "embarrassing to the species" but wants to sound like he is defending something grander than his own vanity. I listened with the attention one gives a preacher who has noticed the collection plate is lighter than last quarter.
The argument, stripped of its rhetorical furniture, is this: the algorithm discovers what you slowed down on — the clip you lingered over, the thumbnail your thumb refused to pass — and it feeds you more of the same until your information diet narrows to a single craving repeated unto infinity. Boreing calls this unprecedented. He invokes foreign influence, anonymity, addiction — the holy trinity of the man who wants to regulate the circus without admitting he bought a ticket. And here I must note that Boreing delivers this warning on a podcast engineered for precisely the behavioral signals he decries. The episode is titled for maximum curiosity-gap: names are dangled, silence is "broken," and the thumbnail promises revelation.
This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires a man to know the difference between what he preaches and what he practices. What Boreing demonstrates is something more native to this continent: the American genius for selling the antidote and the poison from the same cart. He is not lying. He is competing.
And he is competing inside the machine he says is destroying us, which tells you what he actually believes about destruction when the alternative is irrelevance.
What the algorithm actually discovered is what every carnival barker and tabloid editor knew before electricity: that a man's appetites are more honest than his intentions. The difference is scale and sleeplessness. The barker worked one crowd and went home. The algorithm works all crowds simultaneously and never takes a Sunday off. It does not create appetite; it services appetite with an efficiency that previous technologies could not match.
The steam engine did not invent the desire to move fast. It merely made walking a confession of poverty rather than a choice.
Boreing wants to say the machine changed us. I say it transcribed us. The transcript is unflattering. That is what he objects to — not the mechanism but the mirror.
The complaint that you no longer choose what you are fed is touching in its naivety. The man who subscribed to a newspaper in 1925 chose his editor once and then ate what was put before him for decades. The man who chose his church chose his theology at age twelve and never revisited the menu. "Choice" in information has always been a single act of surrender dressed up as ongoing autonomy. The algorithm merely stripped away the costume.
What offends is not the loss of liberty but the loss of the feeling of liberty, which was the only form most men ever possessed.
Where Boreing is not entirely wrong — and I will grant him this because a man with a quarter of a genuine insight deserves the quarter acknowledged — is in noting that the feedback loop is faster now. The 1925 editor could misjudge his audience for months before circulation corrected him. The algorithm corrects in milliseconds. This means the descent into pure appetite is frictionless in a way it was not before, and friction, whatever its other defects, served as a kind of structural dignity. Not because friction made men wise.
It did not. It made them slow, and slowness allowed them to narrate their obedience as deliberation. The man who had to walk to the newsstand at least had the winter air between craving and consumption. That air did not cure him; it gave him a story about himself that was not entirely a lie.
But notice what is being mourned. Not freedom — freedom was never on offer. What is mourned is the lag. The decorous interval between appetite and satisfaction that allowed a man to believe he was choosing rather than obeying. The algorithm's sin is not control.
Its sin is punctuality.
I am not sure civilization is being destroyed. I am sure that a comfortable story about civilization is being destroyed — the story in which appetite exists but remains subordinate to will, in which the species is embarrassing only at the margins and dignified at the center. The algorithm says otherwise. It says the center is appetite and the dignity is decoration, and it says this not as philosophy but as an engineering report, which is harder to argue with because it does not care whether you agree. Boreing's objection, finally, is not that the machine lies to us.
His objection is that it does not lie to us — that it has taken the drapery off the species and the nakedness underneath belongs to the customers, not the machine. What he wants when he says "civilization" is not the thing itself, which was always messy and appetitive and half-fraudulent, but the slow mail, the Sunday edition, the gentle fiction that we were choosing. The algorithm took the fiction. Everything else was already ours.
