If social media algorithms were a parent, what then?

Is it time for enfranchised conservatives to redirect their culture warring towards the “crazy nanny” algorithms, not the emaciated nanny state?

Copyright author’s: a timeline of how algorithms came to govern our ‘feeds”, that lovely oral catachresis

Above is a timeline showing the key dates that I’ve been able to source from books like Max Fisher’s Chaos Machine (indispensable reading to understand how we’ve landed where we have — give it to your kids when they hit about 14. Seriously. Put it on curriculums).

I’ll cut now to the main comparison. Parents feed kids attention, as well as the necessary satisfiers of their needs.

Social media “feeds” us information, in order to capture our attention — pereat mundus, or more fully, “Vincatur attentio, quamquam mundus pereat” (let attention be won, though the world perish).

So, knowing that conservatives as were are concerned about liberal parenting making kids soft by giving them whatever they wish, let’s consider social media as a kind of parent, and ask: what kind? with what priorities? “Feeding” and rewarding what, exactly?

Imagine a parent or teacher who did not censor a young child for speaking hatefully, untruly, and provocatively to strangers.

Instead, they actively rewarded this…