I’m a staunch advocate of keeping up with current events, both local and global. My sole unerring routine is to go through my morning cycle of news, starting with Washington Post, leading into Geopolitical Futures, and ending with my local news website’s past 24 hours of articles. I’ll repeat the first two later in the day most like, and I always watch PBS Newshour live (okay, sometimes I listen with it in the background).

I’ll always advocate knowing as opposed to not knowing. But with information warfare having grown beyond cyberattacks and sabotage to now include subtle manipulations and implicit suggestions presented to us in a never-ending stream of new media, it’s hard to stay up to date without falling prey to implicit and systemic biases. the competition for consumers’ minds and loyalties is fierce, and there’s no practical way to not play. Services like TikTok are causing more harm than good and in my opinion should be banned—but what do we do about their replacement? There’s still going to be a market for short, easily accessible and digestible video. That market needs to be kept engaged, so leveraging data collection, refinement of said data into a functional algorithm and deploying that so that users are kept coming back for more isn’t even unique to services like these. Everywhere we go online has ways of tracking, profiling and tempting us with curated content that’s always opt-out, not opt-in.

It restricts us, makes us less willing or even capable of sifting through unfiltered content to get to what we want. Now, I’m reading articles predicting that people will soon shift away from social media to group chats and individual websites. The virulent hater of all things that came after MySpace adores this shift, but I can’t help but notice that it trades the virtual barriers between groups present in social media for actual ones. Add in the push by Google, Microsoft and other search magnates to incorporate generative AI into their results, effectively letting the user tailor their preferences into delivered results, and the World Wide Web is looking downright dystopian.

Even when the internet started falling short of the Trekkian ideals of an egalitarian society where information matters, not the informer—oh, about three years before I was born some might argue—I still held out the belief that as long as parts of the internet can hold to that ideal, it’s still salvageable. More and more however, I think time will unfold events not unlike Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, where those who wish to not adhere to the collective preference will exist on the edges. Persistence, but never growth.

I don’t even know if it’s a bad thing, to be honest. It’s hard to tell, when it takes so much effort to find information that wasn’t tailored to your specifications.