News Summary

• Last quarter, one company made fifty-five billion dollars selling ads against what you do online.
• To sell to you, the machine needs to build a profile: What you like, what you click and what you buy.
• Then it charges advertisers to reach that profile.
• The more predictable you are, the cleaner the container and category you’re in, the more they pay.
• That same profile decides what fills your feed.
• So the feed does not reward your best work.
• It rewards your most predictable work and the posts that keep you scrolling past the ads.
• Change what you write about, and the machine is no longer sure who to show it to.
• So it shows it to fewer people.
• Your online visibility is throttled.
• And it doesn’t matter how good your content or writing is.
• Your genius is sent to the graveyard.
• And you get no warning and no reason.
• Just black box purgatory.