How the Algorithm Made us Culturally Inbred (and Is Now Ruining Public Policy)
Have you come across someone recently and thought they have their head so far up their algorithms clacker they can’t tell if it’s day or night? Me too.
Have you come across someone recently and thought they have their head so far up their algorithms clacker they can’t tell if it’s day or night? Me too.
The algorithmed are making less sense every day. Convinced that they’re living in a world that’s not a reality - and maybe they are. To be completely frank, those individuals can hump their AI sexbots all they like and I don’t care. But the problem is that it is now seeping into policy formulation and that affects all of us.
In a bygone time the chronically online spent their days shouting into the void, policing men and cancelling women. It was tedious but not life-threatening. But now politicians are becoming algorithmed too. And that’s dangerous because they’re creating policies for a virtual echo chamber, not a reality.
Algorithms have had a great run. Using us as mice to polarise men v women, young v old, left v right, conservatives v furries, all the while making rich dudes richer, eroding democracy, ripping off journalism and evading tax. If all that wasn’t good enough, they’ve also made us inbred.
Paleontologist Henry Gee has said: “Species are not fixed entities; they are populations, and populations can shrink to the point where their genetic diversity becomes dangerously small.”
The issue in 2025 is not that we are lacking genetic diversity, but that our diversity of thought has become dangerously small. The deliberately curated feed that sends us views affirming our own is malicious. We all start thinking the same as everyone else in our silo, and everyone outside the silo/tribe is the enemy. Gee notes that genetic inbreeding results in harmful mutations, a lack of resilience and reduces a species’ ability to cope with change.
Compounding this is that our politicians are becoming culturally inbred too. On the left everything is free, everyone holds hands (unless you disagree with 1% of their views) and no one pays taxes, and on the right, everything is weirdly and hyperbolically war-charged; speaking about groceries like it’s the Battle of the Somme.
Political Scientist Henry Farrell (what’s with all the Henrys?!) noted on an Ezra Klein podcast that politicians are increasingly interchanging the pub-test for their own echo-chamber test.
“Politicians spend too much time living inside platforms like Twitter, thinking they’re hearing the public. But really they’re hearing a tiny, hyper-politicised subset of people. It makes them more reactive, more ideological, and more afraid of being attacked online than of doing good policy work. The internet distorts their sense of what voters actually want.”
We are seeing this more and more in Australian politics. Politicians on both sides walking around with the confidence and conviction that they have their finger on the pulse, when it actual fact they too have just succumbed to the Chinese Communist Party’s TikTok.
Being a policy maker and legislator is really serious business and we are all kind of dependent on them getting it right. So if they could pull their heads out of the algorithms clacker, that would be greatly appreciated.