Are Algorithms Sapping Your Power to Choose?

There’s a moment in ‘Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?’ How personal taste fell out of fashion, a recent Guardian piece, that stopped me. A stylist at a London market, talking about the endless churn of fashion microtrends, says: “I see something that’s my vibe being turned into a microtrend… have I been influenced, or is this actually me?”

Everyone’s talking about shrinking attention spans right now, and that’s real. The good news is that attention turns out to be relatively quick to win back. Cut the notifications, get off the algorithmic feeds, read something long-form, and within a few weeks your capacity to focus measurably improves. There’s decent research behind that.

What’s harder to win back, and what I don’t think we’re talking about enough, is something underneath attention. Not what we’re looking at, but whether we know what we want before something else tells us. Call it agency. I suspect that’s the thing actually being eroded, on a much longer timeline, with far less awareness that it’s happening at all.

Here’s my own version of it. I read widely. Literary fiction, detective novels, historical fiction, science fiction. And I love a binge read. I’ll discover an author and devour their entire back catalogue (the Slow Horses books, if you’re wondering, are very good). But the moment I finish, the algorithm locks on. Every recommendation becomes “if you liked that, you’ll like this,” and it’s all the same lane. I don’t want more spy thrillers. I want the kind of left turn that’s exactly what reading widely is for. And I can’t find it, because as far as the system is concerned, that’s what I am now.

I know what the response is: go to a library, go to a bookstore, browse. Fair enough. But that’s not really the point. The point is what the mechanism does. It takes a moment of genuine enthusiasm, something I actually loved, and uses it to narrow everything that comes after.

The Guardian piece names the deeper version of this directly. These platforms built their entire business on the promise of personalization, of finally serving up exactly what you like. What actually happened, as the article puts it, is closer to the opposite. Individual taste got dissolved rather than served. We stopped choosing what we consume and started just absorbing what we’re given, in such volume that we no longer have the capacity to actually digest or evaluate any of it.

I think most of us know that feeling from somewhere else in life, too. Anyone who’s spent years in a relationship, a job, or a friendship where they got used to deferring to someone else’s preferences knows what happens afterward. There’s a strange period where you genuinely don’t know what you think anymore. Not because your opinions disappeared, but because the part of you that used to check in with them went quiet. You got so used to taking what was offered and adjusting around it that the muscle for asking “wait, what do I actually want here?” stopped getting used.

Now imagine that happening with something that’s adjusting itself to you, constantly, for years, and never once asks whether it’s still working for you. That’s what a personalization algorithm is. It’s not a neutral mirror. It’s more like a relationship where one side keeps offering and the other side keeps taking, and the offering gets so relentless and so well tailored that you stop noticing there was ever a choice involved.

There’s a sharper edge to this, too. The Guardian article describes something called “clipping,” where companies pay people to flood social platforms with content about a song or show, specifically so the algorithm reads it as organic enthusiasm and amplifies it further. One industry estimate put the share of “authentic interest” online that’s actually disguised advertising at around 90 percent. So even the things that feel like your own discoveries, the stuff “everyone” suddenly seems excited about, might have been manufactured to look that way from the start.

I talk to a lot of people who describe feeling like there’s nothing they can do about “the system,” whatever system they happen to mean. Not as cynicism exactly, more as a kind of flatness about it. I’ve started wondering whether that feeling and this one are related. If the muscle for checking in with your own preferences has gone quiet because something else has been doing the choosing for you, gradually, for years, would you even notice it had happened?

Have we been sapped of agency by these algorithms? I don’t think that’s too strong a question. I also don’t think it has a tidy answer. But it might be worth sitting with, next time you notice yourself reaching for the thing the feed already decided you’d want.