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Old gatekeepers might not always have been worthy of praise, but at least there were a lot of them. And in that multiplicity there was the basis for democracy. In Amazon's vision of the future, there's just one gate. And while Jeff Bezos may wave everyone through, the health of the book business ha…

[...] let's not confuse Amazon with a utopian experiment in participatory democracy. Amazon always gives better treatment to some artifacts than others--promoting them in email, on its home page, and through its recommendation algorithms. This is tremendous cultural power, especially given how so m…

[...] Don Graham's grandfather, Eugene Meyer, spoke of his new duties with solemn obligation:

The newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large and not to private interests of its owners. In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its materia…

the new knowledge monopolies [...] don't actually produce knowledge; they just sift and organize it. We rely on a small handful of companies to provide us with a sense of hierarchy, to identify what we read and what we should ignore, to pick informational winners and losers. It's incredible economi…

Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of th…