🌀 Algorithmic Fate: Do Feeds Choose for Us?

{{rh_onboarding_line}}

You open TikTok. You didn't select that video about houseplant care; it chose you. Three hours later, you're an expert on propagating pothos and wondering how the algorithm knew you needed this before you did.

Here's the unsettling math: Over 80% of what people watch on Netflix comes from its recommendations, not from active searching. On TikTok, accounts with fewer followers get more than 75% of their impressions from the "For You" page, a feed you never curated. Spotify reports that 33% of all artist discoveries happen through algorithmic recommendations.

We scroll, thinking we're choosing. But more and more, something else is guiding what we see, hear, think about, and maybe even who we become. The ancients called this fate. We call it the algorithm.

Get help from a licensed therapist - anytime, anywhere. BetterHelp has helped over 5 million people, with no commitment, 100% online.

Take the first step, with 25% off your first month, and a network of 30,000 therapists to choose from. BetterHelp therapy is HSA + FSA eligible. Just take our quiz to get matched with a therapist and start your journey.

GET 25% OFF TODAY

_{This email was delivered by a third-party, on behalf of BetterHelp. Copyright © 2025 BetterHelp. All Rights Reserved. 990 Villa St, Mountain View, California, United States.}

The Oracle of Delphi sat on a tripod above a chasm, inhaling vapours, speaking in tongues. Priests translated her utterances into prophecies that influenced wars, marriages, and migrations. People travelled for months across the Mediterranean to seek guidance they believed came from Apollo himself.

In Cameroon, the Mambila people practise spider divination. The diviner places leaves over a tarantula's burrow, asks a question, and interprets the spider's movements as answers. Anthropologist David Zeitlyn documented how these oracular results are presented in court by village chiefs as evidence, not as superstition, but as a legitimate decision-making technology.

What these practices share with your For You page is a structure: an unknowable mechanism that processes inputs and produces outputs you are meant to trust. The oracle's vapors, the spider's walk, and the neural network's weights are all opaque systems that speak with authority.

The difference? At Delphi, you asked one question and returned home with one answer. Your phone offers a thousand micro-oracles per hour, each nudging you towards something it predicts you'll want. The ancients consulted fate. We live within it.

The philosopher Spinoza had a dark thought about free will. In his Ethics, he argued that we only feel free because we're ignorant of what actually causes our choices. As he put it: "Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them to wanting."

Spinoza imagined a stone set in motion; if it could think, it would believe it was flying of its own free will, unaware of the hand that threw it.

His point wasn't that choosing is impossible. It was that recognising your causes is the first step towards freedom. True liberty, for Spinoza, means acting rather than being acted upon, understanding the forces that shape you well enough to move with purpose.

The recommendation algorithm is a kind of cause, one we rarely examine. Every swipe trains it. Every pause tells it something. The question isn't whether algorithms influence us; they clearly do. The question is whether knowing this changes how we scroll.

They all have newsletters.

If you’re building a personal brand, social can only take you so far. Algorithms glitch. Reach tanks. But a newsletter gives you real ownership and revenue.

That’s why we built a free 5-day email course that shows you how to grow and monetize with sponsorships, digital products, and B2B services.

Usually we charge $97, but for the next 24 hours it’s free. Sign up for the course today.

Get the course 100% free

TikTok's algorithm learns your preferences after watching about 200 videos. By then, the system has profiled you: your emotional valence, attention patterns, and what causes you to pause or scroll. A 2024 study in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that algorithms create feedback loops between human behavior and platform optimization. We shape the algorithm, and it shapes us back.

This creates what researchers call "filter bubbles", personalised information environments so tailored that they restrict exposure to anything outside your established preferences. A 2025 systematic review of 30 studies found that algorithmic systems "structurally amplify ideological homogeneity, reinforcing selective exposure and limiting viewpoint diversity."

Yet here's the paradox: users aren't passive. The same research shows that young people engage in "algorithmic resistance" by deliberately watching content outside their feeds, following accounts to disrupt their profiles, and attempting to confuse the system into showing them something new.

We're Spinoza's stones, perhaps thrown by forces we didn't choose. But some of us are learning to see the hand.

📜 Quote: "Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them to wanting." — Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

📊 Study: A 2024 Harvard Misinformation Review study found that more frequent social media use was linked to lower algorithmic awareness among young adults. The more immersed you are, the less you notice the water.

🎨 Artifact: TikTok's "Not Interested" button, the illusion of control, feeding more data to the very system you're trying to resist.

😂 Meme: "The algorithm has been showing me cottage cheese recipes and I'm scared to ask what it knows about my future."

🤔 Prompt: When did you last discover something online that the algorithm didn't serve you that you found entirely on your own?

Have you ever tried to "break" your algorithm by watching something completely random just to see what happens? What did you learn? Hit reply and tell us about your attempts to confuse the machines. The best experiments might make a future issue.

The ancients crossed deserts to ask oracles a single question. We carry a thousand oracles in our pockets, and they never stop answering, even when we didn't ask.

Spinoza's insight still holds true: knowing what influences you is the first step toward freedom. It's not about escaping since you can't entirely leave the algorithmic environment any more than you can escape language, but about cultivating intention. This involves recognising the feed's logic and understanding that it aims to serve someone else's goals.

The algorithm has become the new destiny. But destiny was never about giving in. Even the Greeks who consulted Delphi understood that the prophecy was merely the beginning. What you chose to do with it remained your decision.

Subscribe to Culture Decoded for weekly insights on modern behavior.