Hello and welcome to another Deep Dive. Today
is Monday, February 2, 2026. And if you've been
tracking the headlines, or honestly just trying
to scroll through your phone over the last couple
of weeks, you know things are different. Different
is one word for it. The digital ground has fundamentally
shifted under our feet. It really has. We're
looking at what feels like a completely new internet
architecture, and it all happened, what, just
10 days ago. It's the end of an era. And the
start of. Well, that's what we're here to figure
out, isn't it? But you're right. We are sitting
here just a couple of weeks past January 22,
2026. And that's a date that is going to be in
the history books for media studies, for political
science, probably for computer engineering for
decades to come. That was the day the ink finally
dried. After years of speculation, the US operations
of TikTok were officially sold to a US consortium.
The saga is finally over. I mean, the ban threats,
the court cases, the executive orders, it's been
going on for what feels like forever. And it
all just culminated in this one absolutely massive
transaction. It is massive. And I think before
we even get into the weeds of what's happening
now, we have to just take a second to appreciate
the sheer scale of what was just sold. Right.
We're not just talking about some app where teenagers
do dances. I mean, we are talking about a platform
that way back in 2021 surpassed Google. Surpassed
Google. As the most popular domain on the entire
Internet. I remember when that stat dropped,
it felt like a glitch in the matrix. You know,
Google is the Internet for most people. It's
the front door. Yeah. For a video feed to overtake
search traffic. That was the signal that the
entire hierarchy of information had just been
turned on its head. Precisely. And the growth
was just astronomical. It reached... A billion
users faster than Facebook, faster than Instagram,
faster than YouTube. A billion. By 2020, it had
over 2 billion downloads and was operating in
50 languages. This wasn't just a product. It
became a global cultural engine. It effectively
replaced the whole idea of the social graph from
the 2010s with something entirely new. And that
is exactly. the mission for this deep dive. We
have a huge stack of sources here from technical
breakdowns of the recommendation engine to supply
chain reports on pharmaceutical shortages. Everything.
We're not just going to rehash the political
theater of the last month, though we obviously
have to touch on it. We're going to try to unpack
the black box of the app itself. We have to answer
the fundamental question. What did this American
consortium actually buy? Because, sure, the ownership
changed, but the machinery is what matters. The
engine. the engine how does that algorithm actually
work how did it rewrite the rules for the music
industry for fashion and i mean even how we buy
medicine and crucially what does this new ownership
mean for the future of that machinery we're already
seeing the fallout we've got reports of censorship
we've got the rise of competitor apps like upscrolled
and this fracturing of the internet that people
have been warning about for years it's happening
it really is it's a lot to get through it is
but we have to start with that ender, the secret
sauce. Okay, let's get into it. Segment one,
the algorithm. For years, the narrative around
TikTok has been that it's just magic. You know,
you open it and it just reads your mind. Right,
the telepathic feed. But looking at the technical
papers and some of the leaked audit documents
we have, it's not magic. It's just extremely
efficient collaborative filtering. It's math.
Very specific, very aggressive math. And to understand
why it worked so well, you really have to contrast
it with the incumbent at the time, which was
Facebook. Facebook and Instagram, to a lesser
extent, were built on what we called the social
graph. The social graph being, I see content
because I know you, we're friends, or I follow
you, so your posts appear in my feed. The personal
connection is the filter. Exactly. The constraint
on your feed was your social circle. TikTok just
flipped that completely on its head. They built
an interest graph. The For You page. FYP. And
that page didn't care who you knew. It didn't
care if you had zero friends or zero followers
on the platform. Which is so different from anything
else. It only cared about one thing. The content's
performance against your specific behavioral
vector. And this is where the cold start problem
usually kills new apps, right? Yeah. But TikTok
somehow solved it. They did. You could join post
one video. And if the signals were right, you
could hit a million views in 24 hours. The barrier
to entry was effectively zero. So let's talk
about those signals, because I think most people
still overestimate the value of a like. A like
is a very weak signal. It's almost. You might
like a video just to be nice or because your
friend sent it to you, but it doesn't mean you
really loved it. The algorithm, according to
the leaked engineering documents we're looking
at, prioritized one thing above all else. Right.
Retention. So weighted completion rate. That's
the industry term for it. Yeah. Yeah. Did you
watch the video from the very start to the very
finish? That is a massive positive signal to
the algorithm. And if you watched it more than
once. Oh, that's exponential. A rewatch is gold.
But it goes so much deeper than that. It tracks
the velocity of your scroll. The speed of your
thumb. Exactly. If you linger on a video about,
say, sourdough baking for just three seconds
before swiping versus swiping instantly on a
dance video, the system records that hesitation.
It learns. So it's analyzing your boredom threshold
in real time. It's building a profile based on
these tiny micro interactions that you, the user.
aren't even aware you're performing. And this
is where that Wall Street Journal investigation
from 2021 was so pivotal. You remember that?
Vaguely, yeah. They made a bunch of fake accounts.
They created all these bot accounts with very
specific interests. One was programmed to be
into depression content. One was into politics
and so on. And they just tracked how long it
took the algorithm to figure them out. And it
was terrifyingly fast, wasn't it? I think. The
number that stuck with me was something like
40 minutes. 40 minutes for the algorithm to completely
zero in on a user's psychological vulnerabilities
and build a feed around them. Wow. Because it
excels at understanding emotion. It's not just
tagging videos with cats or cars. It's tagging
them with soothing, chaotic, depressive, aspirational.
So it creates a feed that feels telepathic. Because
it's literally mapping your emotional state in
real time. And it's serving you dopamine hits
that are perfectly tailored to your psychological
profile at that exact moment you're scrolling.
Which brings us to the algorithmic meritocracy
argument. The idea that the best content just
rises to the top and the feed is this perfect
unbiased mirror of what you want to see. The
great myth. But. We know that's not entirely
true, is it? We have to talk about heating. The
heating button. This is the thing that completely
undermines that whole meritocracy myth. This
story broke in Forbes back in January 2023. And
I remember reading it and just thinking, OK,
so the game is rigged. It was. The report revealed
that employees at both TikTok and its parent
company, ByteDance, had a manual tool. I'm literally
a boost button that could just push certain videos
into the viral stratosphere. So it wasn't just
the algorithm picking the winners. It was humans,
employees sitting at desks. The report estimated
that at any given time, one to two percent of
total daily video views were heated. And one
or two percent sounds small. It sounds tiny.
But on a platform with billions of views a day,
that's tens of millions of artificially generated
impressions every single day. And the criteria
for heating a video, it wasn't just, oh, this
is a good video. It was strategic. Highly strategic.
I mean, originally the stated purpose was innocent
enough. It was about diversity. Right. Because
if the algorithm is too efficient, it just rabbit
holes you into one type of content. Exactly.
And you get bored. So they would heat videos
from different genres to force them into your
feed to sort of broadening your horizons and,
you know, keep you on the app longer. But they
also use it for business. Of course they did.
They used it to court influencers and major brands.
If you're trying to get, say, Taylor Swift to
join the platform or the NBA or the FIFA World
Cup. You can't leave their view counts up to
chance. You can't. You heat their first few videos.
They see these millions of views. They get that
same dopamine hit we were talking about and suddenly
they're hooked. It's basically a bait and switch.
It's just corporate vanity metrics. But the Forbes
report went darker than that, didn't it? It wasn't
just corporate strategy. No. There were instances
of employees using it for personal reasons. That's
the real risk of any kind of manual intervention.
So what, boosting their own videos? You had reports
of employees heeding their own personal accounts
or their spouse's account or their friend's accounts.
It just shattered the illusion that if you just
made good content, you could be famous. In reality,
there was always this editorial layer, a human
layer, deciding what the culture should see.
Which brings us to a really important distinction,
the one between what we saw here in the West
and what exists in China. Because for a long
time, there was this misconception that TikTok
was the same app everywhere. Right. But we need
to talk about Douyin. Douyin is the original.
TikTok is effectively the export version of the
app. And while they share the same underlying
code base, the same DNA, they really evolved
into two completely different species. Douyin
is often described as a super app in China. It's
not just for entertainment. No, not at all. It's
integrated into the economy in a way that TikTok
is only just now starting to attempt in the West.
Years ago, Davin had these advanced features.
Like what? Like you could search a video by a
person's face to find other content they appeared
in. You could book a hotel directly through a
travel video. If you saw a restaurant review
you liked, you could tap a button and reserve
a table. Wow. It was an e -commerce engine first
and an entertainment app second. But the biggest
difference, the one that always came up in the
political debates, was the regulation, the so
-called teenage mode. This is what critics of
ByteDance always, always pointed to. In China,
the government enforced these incredibly strict
controls on Douyin for minors. If you were under
14 years old, you were automatically placed in
teenage mode. And that wasn't just a suggestion
you could click past. It was a hard lock. A hard
lock. You were limited to 40 minutes a day. The
app was completely inaccessible between 10 p
.m. and 6 a .m. And most importantly, the content
itself was filtered. So no viral dances or pranks.
No. You were seeing science experiments, virtual
museum tours, history lessons, patriotic content.
It was all educational. It was essentially a
state -run digital classroom. It was, whereas
the export version, or TikTok, had none of those
guardrails, at least not initially. It was the
Wild West. And critics called it an opium for
the masses strategy. The argument was keep the
domestic population educated and disciplined
and export the digital fentanyl to the West.
Digital fentanyl, as you call it, didn't just
keep people scrolling. It fundamentally reshaped
entire industries. Absolutely. Which brings us
perfectly to the next section, the cultural ripple
effect. Let's start with music, because I think
that's where the impact was most immediate and
most obvious. TikTok became the de facto A &R
department for the entire global music industry.
I mean, if you look at the Billboard Hot 100
from, say, 2020 to 2025, there is a direct undeniable
correlation between TikTok virality and chart
success. It became the kingmaker. Lil Nas X is
the classic case study, right? Old Town Road
didn't break because of radio play. It broke
because of memes. But I think the more interesting
phenomenon really was the sleeper hit. The resurrection
of the back catalog. This was both a nightmare
and an absolute goldmine for the record labels.
Right. Suddenly, Fleetwood Mac's Dreams is charting
because of a guy on a skateboard drinking ocean
spray. Or Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill hitting
number one decades after it was released, all
because it was in Stranger Things and then exploded
in a TikTok trend. It completely broke the traditional
music release cycle. Labels stopped focusing
only on what was new and started like data mining
their own archives for 15 second soundbites that
might go viral. But that power dynamic created
massive friction. We have to talk about the Universal
Music Group standoff in early 2024. That was
a huge moment. UMG, the biggest music company
in the world, basically looked at the numbers
and said, wait a minute, you're building a multi
-billion dollar business on our back and you're
paying us pennies for it. So they pulled the
plug. They removed their entire catalog from
the platform. Taylor Swift, Drake, The Weeknd
just gone overnight. The app felt like a ghost
town for a few months. I remember it was just
like... royalty -free stock music and really
bad acapella covers. It was a game of chicken.
And UMG was also citing concerns about AI, which
was a huge deal at the time. They were worried
that TikTok was becoming a breeding ground for
AI -generated tracks that were diluting the royalty
pool for real human artists. But they came back
eventually. They did. Taylor Swift's music returned
in April 2024. But the whole episode proved that
even the biggest artists in the world were now
dependent on this one platform for discovery
and distribution. But the ripple effect went
way, way beyond entertainment. We saw it in global
supply chains. Yeah. The Feta Pasta incident
is kind of funny, but it's also a serious case
study in logistics failure. It sounds ridiculous,
but it was absolutely real. A single viral recipe
video caused a global run on block -fedded cheese.
A global run. Grocery stores in Finland and the
U .S. and the U .K., they just ran out of stock
for weeks. Dairy supply chains are not built
for that kind of viral spike. You can't just,
you know, make more cheese overnight. It takes
months. That is the Amazon effect on steroids.
But, I mean, while running out of cheese is annoying,
running out of medicine is life -threatening.
Yes. The Ozempic shortage is... probably the
single most serious real -world consequence of
the entire TikTok era. This is where the ethics
get really, really murky. You had a drug, semaglutide,
sold as Ozempic or Wegovy, that was designed
for people with type 2 diabetes. Right. And it
had a known side effect of weight loss. Suddenly,
you have a hashtag, hashtag Ozempic journal with
over 360 million views. You have influencers
who were not diabetic at all documenting their
dramatic weight loss. And they were getting prescriptions
off -label. Exactly. The demand just skyrocketed
overnight. Pharmacies could... not keep up. And
the result was that actual diabetics people who
needed that drug to regulate the insulin levels
could not fill their prescription. We have reports
from the Australian Medical Regulatory Agency
explicitly linking the national shortage directly
to these social media trends. It just highlights
this massive failure in our information ecosystem.
Medical advice was being dispensed by influencers
with zero qualifications, and the algorithm didn't
distinguish between a board -certified endocrinologist
and a 19 -year -old beauty vlogger. No, if the
vlogger had better lighting and a catchier hook,
they got the views. And the market responded
to the views. It forced pharmaceutical companies
to completely rethink their manufacturing and
supply chains, all because of an algorithmic
trend. And we saw the same thing happen in publishing
with BookTok. BookTok was fascinating because
it was one of the few like purely positive supply
chain shocks. It single handedly revived the
physical book market, especially for young adults.
It's true. You go into a Barnes & Noble now.
And there are whole tables dedicated to as seen
on BookTok. It drove millions of copies of sales
for authors like Colleen Hoover. It proved that
long form reading wasn't dead. It just needed
a new discovery engine. And fashion, too. The
midsize movement was born there. That was a really
important corrective movement. For years, fashion
was so binary. You were either a size zero or
you were plus size. TikTok creators started showing
what a size 10 or 12 or 14 actually looked like.
It forced brands to acknowledge the existence
of the average body. But we also saw the darker
side of all that consumerism with the de -influencing
trend. Oh man. I love the concept of de -influencing
at first. Don't buy this. It's overhyped. It's
trash. It felt like a genuine rebellion. It started
that way. It was a backlash against the constant,
unrelenting pressure to consume, to buy, to haul.
But look at how quickly it was co -opted. Almost
immediately. Within weeks, the script completely
flipped. It became, don't buy this expensive
$40 mascara. Buy this $10 mascara instead. And
by the way, here's my personal affiliate link
for the $10 mascara. So it wasn't anti -consumption
at all. It was just... alternative consumption.
The system just absorbs the critique. You cannot
exist on that platform without feeding the commerce
engine. Even the very act of saying don't buy
became a new kind of shopping recommendation.
That feels like a perfect, if slightly depressing,
segue to the darker psychological impacts. Because
if the app can trick you into buying mascara,
it can trick you into much, much worse. Segment
three, the dark side. We have to talk about the
rabbit hole. This is the core safety flaw of
any interest -based graph. If a user shows even
a momentary fleeting interest in something harmful,
say extreme dieting, or self -harm imagery. The
algorithm doesn't see harmful. It just sees engagement.
It just sees engagement. Yeah. And it serves
more of it. The feedback loop tightens incredibly
quickly. We have ample documentation of teenagers
being just bombarded with pro -anorexia content
or suicide ideation within minutes of searching
for something as innocent as weight loss tips.
And the users were always one step ahead of the
moderators. We saw the rise of what people called
algo -speak. Right. Users would write suicide
as unalive or porn as They created this whole
new lexicon to bypass the automated content filters.
But the human brain, especially the adolescent
brain, decoded it instantly. The filter didn't
work on people. Not at all. And the most tragic
outcomes of this were the challenges, the blackout
challenge in particular. This was horrific. It
encouraged users, mostly kids, to choke themselves
until they passed out, supposedly to achieve
some kind of high. And it resulted in the deaths
of multiple children globally. There were major
lawsuits filed in Italy, in the U .S. In Venezuela,
the Supreme Court actually ordered a crackdown
and fined TikTok tens of millions of dollars
in late 2024 after two children died there. It
just raises this fundamental question of liability.
Is the platform a publisher or is it just a mirror
reflecting society? Well, the TikTok ticks phenomenon
suggests it's much more than just a mirror. It
can be a biological influence. This was a genuine
medical mystery for a moment, wasn't it? Doctors
in the US, the UK, Australia, they all started
seeing this surge in teenage girls presenting
with rapid onset tics. And they were very similar
to Tourette's syndrome. They were shouting the
same specific phrases, making the same specific
physical movements. And they traced it all back
to a few specific creators on the platform. They
did. These patients were all watching popular
creators who genuinely had Tourette's syndrome.
And the doctors determined it was a form of mass
psychogenic illness. So what does that mean?
It means the teenagers' mirror neurons were firing
so intensely from watching these videos over
and over that they physically adopted the symptoms
they were watching. It shows that the connection
between the screen and the brain is far more
porous, far more direct than we ever thought.
Wow. And then on top of all that, there's the
whole issue of child safety regarding predators.
The fines really tell the story there. The UK
fined them $12 .7 million for misusing children's
data. The EU hit them with a massive $345 million
fine. The U .S. had that early $5 .7 million
fine. But the investigation into the lives feature
was arguably the most disturbing part of it all.
The refugee camp scams. Yeah. A BBC investigation
found that families in Syrian refugee camps were
going on TikTok live and begging for digital
gifts from viewers. And the viewers thought they
were donating directly to help these desperate
families. Right. But when the money was actually
processed, TikTok was taking up to 70 percent,
seven zero of the proceeds as a commission. So
they were profiting off digital begging in a
literal war zone. It was an absolute low point
for the company. And then you had the sexual
exploitation scandals in Kenya that were exposed
in 2025, where the live streaming feature was
being used essentially as cam girl sites for
minors. It just highlighted that at the scale
of a billion users. Moderation is basically a
myth. You cannot police that much live video
effectively. It's impossible. And all of these
safety failures, they provided the ammunition
for the politicians. But the gun was already
loaded by geopolitics. Exactly. Segment four,
the road to the sale. You simply cannot separate
the story of this app from the broader anxieties
of the U .S.-China relationship. It all comes
down to the fact that TikTok was owned by ByteDance,
a company headquartered in Beijing. In the current
geopolitical climate, that was just a non -starter
for Washington. It centers on two key things,
the golden share and the national intelligence
law of 2017. Let's break those down. OK, the
golden share. The golden share is a specific
Chinese corporate mechanism. The Chinese government,
usually through state -backed funds, takes a
1 % stake in the key domestic subsidiaries of
big tech companies like ByteDance. And 1 % sounds
tiny, but it's not about the money. It's not
about the money at all. It comes with special
rights, usually a board seat and, crucially,
veto power over major content decisions. So the
argument that ByteDance is just a private company
doesn't hold water in the same way it would for
a U .S. company. Exactly. And then you layer
on top of that the 2017 national intelligence
law. This law explicitly states that any Chinese
organization or citizen shall, and I'm quoting
here, And the interpretation of that in the West
was pretty clear. If Beijing asks for the data,
ByteDance cannot legally say no. That was the
core fear. And to be fair, ByteDance tried to
fight this perception for years. They spent billions
on lobbying. They swore up and down that the
data was firewalled. But then came the leaks.
The BuzzFeed news tapes, that quote, everything
is seen in China. That audio leaked in 2022.
It was from internal meetings where U .S.-based
employees were admitting that the master admin
accessed the keys to the kingdom still resided
in Beijing. It completely undercut their entire
public narrative. And then came the spying scandal
in December 2022. This wasn't theoretical anymore.
No, this was active surveillance. ByteDance's
own internal audit team was trying to find the
source of leaks to the press. To do that, they
accessed the personal TikTok data of journalists
from Forbes and the Financial Times. Oh. They
tracked their IP addresses and their location
data to see if they were ever in the same physical
proximity as ByteDance employees who they suspected
were the leakers. They used the app to hunt down
whistleblowers. It was the smoking gun. It proved
that the tool could be used for espionage. Because
it was being used for espionage, albeit for corporate
security. rather than state intelligence. But
for lawmakers, the damage was done. So TikTok
had to pivot hard. They announced Project Texas.
This was their Hail Mary pass. The plan was to
create a new subsidiary, TikTokUSDS, and store
all U .S. user data on servers that were physically
in the U .S. and owned by Oracle. The American
tech giant. And Oracle was supposed to audit
the code, right? That was part of the deal. That
was the big pitch. Oracle would review every
single line of code that went into the app to
ensure there were no back doors to China. They
did a similar thing in Europe called Project
Clover. So why didn't it work? Why didn't Congress
buy it? Because of the very nature of modern
software. The TikTok algorithm isn't a static
document you can read once and approve. It's
updated constantly. It's machine learning. It
evolves by the second. Critics, including a lot
of technical experts, pointed out that you cannot
effectively audit an algorithm that changes every
second unless Oracle controlled the source of
the code, not just reviewed it. The whole thing
was kind of meaningless. So the trust was just
gone. And that brings us to segment five, the
showdown. The years 2024 to 2026. What a roller
coaster. It really was. It started with the legislative
hammer. In March of 2024, the U .S. House passed
H .R. 7521. President Biden signed it into law
in April. The clock officially started ticking.
The deadline was January 19th, 2025. Divest or
be banned. And people forget how close we came
to the cliff. On January 18, 2025, the day before
that deadline, TikTok actually went dark in the
U .S. for about 12 hours. The near -death experience.
I remember it so clearly. My feed just had that
spinning circle. No connection. It was total
chaos. For millions of creators and small businesses,
their entire livelihood just vanished overnight.
But then the political winds shifted. Donald
Trump had just won the 2024 election. And despite
having tried to ban it himself during his first
term, he did a complete 180. He flipped. He realized
the immense political capital of the platform.
He didn't want to be the guy who killed the most
popular app in America on day one of his inauguration.
So he delayed it. He issued an executive order
delaying the enforcement of the ban. He essentially
bought them time to find a buyer. But he couldn't
kill the law entirely. The legal pressure remained.
ByteDance had to sell. And the rumors were just
wild for a while. For a moment, it really looked
like Elon Musk might buy it and try to merge
it with X. I remember that. Then Steve Mnuchin
was putting together a group. But the deal that
finally closed on January 22, 2026 was much more
establishment. Let's look at the new owners.
Who actually holds the keys to the kingdom now?
It's officially called the USDS joint venture.
Now, ByteDance actually got to keep 19 .9%. They
aren't fully out of the picture, which was a
big concession. But the controlling stake? The
controlling 80 .1 % is a mix of Oracle, the private
equity firm Silverlake, an AI company called
MGX, and a consortium led by Michael Dell. So
it's big tech and private equity. It is as corporate
America as you can possibly get. Adam Presser
is the new CEO. Sho Chu is still on the board
as a director. But the power has clearly shifted.
The servers are fully under U .S. control. But
there is one line in that deal announcement that
caught everyone's attention. The source notes
we have mentioned that the algorithm will be
adjusted over time to favor American topics.
That is the phrase that pays. Favor American
topics. What does that mean technically? Does
it mean boosting NFL clips over soccer clips?
Or does it mean suppressing foreign news? Or
does it mean something more ideological? And
we're already finding out. Which brings us to
right now, segment six, the new controversy.
Because we all thought the sale would save the
app, but it seems like we've just traded one
set of problems for another. We basically traded
China anxiety for corporate censorship anxiety.
The ink on the deal is barely dry, and we are
already seeing widespread reports of videos disappearing.
Specifically political content. Yes. There are
very serious allegations. And Gavin Newsom, the
governor of California, is already launching
an investigation into this, that the new algorithm
is suppressing anti -Trump content, criticism
of ICE, and very curiously, any mentions of Jeffrey
Epstein. So the fear for years was that the Chinese
government would use the app to manipulate American
public opinion. Now, the accusation is that the
new American owners are using the app to manipulate
American public opinion. It really raises the
question. Is a platform this powerful ever neutral?
And the answer seems to be a resounding no. Whoever
owns the server owns the reality. And the users
are reacting. We are seeing a mass migration.
It's the SplinterNet happening in real time.
Just look at the App Store charts this week.
An app called Upscrolled is sitting at number
two. It's a direct TikTok clone and its whole
marketing pitch is unfiltered feeds. But the
irony, and I love this detail. is the rise of
RedNote. This is the ultimate plot twist. RedNote
is the international name for Xiaohongshu, which
is another Chinese app. It's sort of like a mix
of Instagram and Reddit. So let me get this straight.
Users are fleeing the newly Americanized TikTok.
because of censorship fears to join an actual
Chinese app. Because they perceive it as being
more authentic and crucially outside the reach
of U .S. political tinkering. It just shows you
how completely fractured the landscape has become.
We used to have something resembling a global
village. Everyone everywhere saw the same memes.
Now. Now we have walls, digital walls. TikTok
is banned in India, Nepal, Albania, banned it
in 2025. It's restricted on government devices
all across the EU and the U .S. And now the U
.S. version is its own distinct, curated garden.
The global era of the Internet is over. We are
now entering the era of the sovereign Internet,
where every region has its own truth, its own
trends, and its own algorithmic bias baked right
in. That is a heavy realization. We started this
deep drive looking at a simple dancing app. And
we ended up staring at the fragmentation of global
reality itself. That's the story of the 2020s,
I guess. The tools we built to connect us ended
up just sorting us into our own little silos.
So here's the final thought for you listening.
The algorithm has new masters. It is now officially
tuned, in their own words, to favor American
topics. But does that actually make you feel
safer? Or does it just make you wonder what you
aren't seeing anymore? The black box is still
a black box. We just painted it red, white, and
blue. And if upscrolled is the new refuge from
all this, does the cycle just start all over
again? History would suggest it does. On that
note. We're going to log off. Stay curious. Check
your sources. And maybe go read a physical book.
See you next time.