In the mundane course of modern life, you might occasionally find yourself glimpsing the dark abyss — that is, catching a few seconds of a stranger’s phone screen. A peek over a shoulder, through a car window at a dash-mounted phone, or perhaps, pointedly, at the hands of a distracted person whose eyes you’re trying to raise, will likely reveal a version of the same thing: not, in 2026, a wall of text, a feed, or even a slideshow of stories, but an endless scroll of tall videos.

Taken together, the videos sometimes tell a simple story in algorithmic silhouette, with one bikini video after another, a cascade of talking sports heads, an unbroken flow of clothes to buy, or influencers talking over the News with a particular political orientation. Just as often, though, a stolen screen glance reveals a dismal anti-story, in which an AI model has guessed, in a whole bunch of different directions, what the user is “most likely to be interested in or engage with.” It has done so by following, to borrow Meta’s language, a series of steps: “Gather inventory,” “leverage signals,” “make predictions,” and “rank reels by score.” To the intended viewer, the resulting mix of videos is incoherent but probably also intuitive, at least on an individual basis. To you, the screen peeper, the spectacle is profoundly uncomfortable, not just because you’re eavesdropping the output of an intimate machine-learning profile gleaned from private and often passive “signals” provided by someone you don’t know, but because you know, deep down, that your chained-together clips........

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