The Pipeline
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The Pipeline
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Narrated by:
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By:
The pipeline does not announce itself. That is its job.
You scroll. You see something. You laugh. You scroll. You see something else. You laugh, slightly less. You scroll. The third thing is harder to laugh at, and somewhere in your gut, in a place older than language, your body registers that something has shifted. But you are tired. You are scrolling because you are tired. You keep going.
Six months later you are looking at content that is no longer funny and you cannot remember when it stopped being funny. You cannot remember the path you took to get here. The algorithm has been refining your taste so steadily, so quietly, so professionally, that the version of you who is now nodding at things would have been horrified, six months ago, by where you ended up.
That is the pipeline. That is what it is. That is what it does. And it is happening, right now, in the bedrooms of millions of teenage boys in this country, while we sit downstairs and reassure ourselves that we have raised them well.