I had studied English because I wanted to be a writer. I never had an expectation of becoming rich. I didn’t care about money. [...] Once I could no longer delay and the payments began, a question echoed through my head from the moment the day began, and often jolted me awake at night. I would look at the number on my paycheck and obsessively subtract my rent, the cost of a carton of eggs and a can of beans (my sustenance during the first lean year of this mess), and the price of a loan payment. The question was: What will you do when the money from the paycheck is gone?

I never arrived at an answer to this question. At my lowest points, I began fantasizing about dying, not because I was suicidal, but because death would have meant relief from having to come up with an answer. My life, I felt, had been assigned a monetary value—I knew what I was worth, and I couldn’t afford it, so all the better to cash out early. The debt was mind-controlling—how I would eat or pay my rent without defaulting was a constant refrain, and I had long since abandoned any hope for a future in which I had a meaningful line of credit or a disposable income or even simply owned something—but also mind-numbingly banal. I spent a great deal of time filling out paperwork over and over again with my personal information and waiting on hold for extended periods in order to speak to a robotic voice rejecting my request. It didn’t matter what the request was or who I was asking. It was always rejected.

And so it felt good to think about dying, in the way that it felt good to take a long nap in order to not be conscious for a while. [...] I started the conversation by asking, “Theoretically, if I were to, say, kill myself, what would happen to the debt?”

“I would have to pay it myself,” my father said, in the same tone he would use a few minutes later to order eggs. He paused and then offered me a melancholy smile, which I sensed had caused him great strain. “Listen, it’s just debt,” he said. “No one is dying from this.”

My father had suffered in the previous two years. In a matter of months, he had lost everything he had worked most of his adult life to achieve—first his career, then his home, then his dignity. He had become a sixty-year-old man who had quite reluctantly shaved his graying forty-year-old mustache in order to look younger, shuffling between failed job interviews where he was often told he had “too much experience.” He was ultimately forced out of the life he’d known, dragging with him, like some twenty-first-century Pa Joad, a U-Haul trailer crammed with family possessions, including, at the insistence of my mother, large plastic tubs of my childhood action figures.

Throughout this misery my father had reacted with what I suddenly realized was stoicism, but which I had long mistaken for indifference. This misunderstanding was due in part to my mother, whom my father mercifully hadn’t lost, and who had suffered perhaps most of all. Not that it was a competition, but if it were, I think she would have taken some small amount of satisfaction in winning it. The loss of home and finances felt at least like a worthy opponent for cancer, and yet here was my father telling me that none of this was the end of the world. I felt a flood of sympathy for him. I was ashamed of my selfishness. The lump in my throat began to feel less infectious than lachrymal. “Okay,” I said to him, and that was that. When I got home I scheduled an appointment with a doctor.

Journalism, too, is in crisis amid the economic and technological riptides and judicial rulings that treat information as another commodity. The First Amendment rightly bars government from abridging “freedom of the press” because, as New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen notes, good journalism brings reportage and commentary to public decision-making. Increasingly, though, journalists are employed by shareholder-driven media corporations that bypass the civic-minded “public” to assemble audiences on any pretext—sensationalistic, erotic, bigoted, nihilistic—that will keep them watching. “Democracy dies in darkness,” proclaims the motto of the Washington Post, now that it’s owned by Amazon proprietor Jeff Bezos, but democracy dies also in a deluge of blindingly bright messages treating citizens as impulse-driven consumers or worse.

Official censorship and reverse censorship matter less in the United States than does what the media critic John Keane calls “market censorship”: the profit-driven distortion of news that has updated the market dictum to “give the people what they want.” It operates under a perversely uncivil model of what the citizen should know and be entertained by—even when, as in Facebook’s case, the category of “knowledge” is effectively effaced to promote feedback loops of conspiracy-mongering, bigotry, and worse.

The relevant model here isn’t public deliberation but platform addiction: the political weaponization of Facebook demonstrates that much of what was once called “journalism” has become a subspecies of operant conditioning—peddling whatever a proprietary algorithm suggests will keep us glued to its screens. Allowing such deranging platforms to operate under libertarian protections of the First Amendment enables media managers to transform their platforms into Foucauldian panopticons that monitor customers’ patterns of behavior in ways that harm user privacy and benefit spinners of political falsehoods such as Cambridge Analytica.

[...] Their research is another expression of Silicon Valley’s fake-it-til-you-make-it culture of denial and opportunism. Yet the outsize hype attached to these projects breeds problems of its own. Regardless of machine-learning “gaydar’s” efficacy, James Vincent wrote at The Verge, “if people believe AI can be used to determine sexual preference, they will use it.” It follows that we’re better served by drawing attention to the error rates and uncertainties of this research than by obscuring its flaws and echoing the bluster of its pitchmen. In the end, Kosinski got it wrong: if he wanted to help the queer community fight “oppressive regimes,” he might have led the publicity drive by trumpeting his paper’s shortcomings. We know from past hokum, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, handwriting analysis, and the polygraph, that the public and private sectors will bet on coin-toss odds. This technology is attractive, despite its failures, because it offers an illusion of standardization and objectivity about that which is conditional and even subjective.

If technology is routinely legitimized by delusions about its impartiality and misplaced faith in its precision, perhaps a wider public acknowledgment of its capacity to fail might slow its unrelenting advance. The failures of surveillance and classification technologies, frustrating as they might be in the moment—especially for their investors—cast doubt on the powerful, the knowledgeable, and the expert. These mistakes demonstrate that systems do not work as intended. And these founderings might also give way to conversations that take place beyond the noisy gibberish of marketing language. Considering its false advertisement, how is this technology used? What restrictions should be placed on it? Should this technology exist? At the risk of creating my own blunt “Strong Female Lead”-style categorization: I think a technology should not exist if there is no procedure to contest and amend its inevitable mistakes. And that’s just to start.