When the algorithm predicts your desires better than you can articulate them, what happens to agency?

In 2025, we live in a hall of mirrors, each one built by code. Netflix tells you what you’d like to watch. TikTok serves up personalities you’ll want to emulate. LinkedIn nudges your ambition. Google completes your questions before you finish asking them. And undelying each of these systems is a learning machine trained to shape you, by first reflecting you. You don't merely get shown what you are; you get told what version of yourself is most clickable.

Identity has always been socially mediated, but never with this precision, this velocity, or this scale.

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