AFTER THE ALGORITHM

Social media has shaped culture for decades. What will A.I. do?

- JOSHUA ROTHMAN

I often wake up before dawn, ahead of my wife and kids, so that I can enjoy a little solitary time. I creep downstairs to the silent kitchen, drink a glass of water, and put in my AirPods. Then I choose some music, set up the coffee maker, and sit and listen while the coffee brews.

It's in this liminal state that my encounter with the algorithm begins. Groggily, I'll scroll through some dad content on Reddit, or watch photography videos on YouTube, or check Apple News. From the kitchen island, my laptop beckons me to work, and I want to accept its invitation—but, if I'm not careful, I might watch every available clip of a movie I haven't seen, or start an episode of “The Rookie,” an ABC police procedural about a middle-aged father who reinvents himself by joining the L.A.P.D. (I discovered the show on TikTok, probably because I'm demographically similar to its protagonist.) In the worst-case scenario, my kids wake up while I'm still scrolling, and I've squandered the hour I gave up sleep to secure.

If this sort of morning sounds familiar, it's because, a couple of decades into the smartphone era, life's rhythms and the algorithm's have merged. We listen to podcasts while getting dressed and watch Netflix before bed. In between, there's Bluesky on the bus, Spotify at the gym, Instagram at lunch, YouTube before dinner, X for toothbrushing, Pinterest for the insomniac hours. It's a strange way to live. Algorithms are old—around 300 B.C., Euclid invented one for finding the greatest common divisor of two integers. They are, essentially, mathematical procedures for solving problems. We use them to coördinate physical things (like elevators) and bureaucratic things (like medical residencies). Did it make sense to treat unclaimed time as a problem? We've solved it algorithmically, and now have none.