The Algorithm as the Seventh Plague
From high above, the world reveals its hidden patterns. Rivers carve ancient scars, cities glow like restless volcanoes, and beneath it all runs a different current data. No map can capture it, yet it moves like an invisible glacier through our lives.
When I wrote The Tenth Plague, I named the seventh plague our blind faith in algorithms, a modern Oracle of Delphi. It was meant as a cautionary image, not a prophecy. But the scenario now unfolds with unsettling speed.
The recent deal that places TikTok firmly in U.S. hands is no ordinary acquisition. Fourteen billion dollars buys more than a company; it buys direct access to the imagination of 170 million Americans, many of them young people who shape their worldview through an endless scroll of short videos. The algorithms filtering their news quietly redraw the map of reality.
And who holds the keys to this vault of data? Oracle, a name that could have been chosen by a poet with a taste for irony. Larry Ellison, a close ally of Donald Trump, now stands at the gate. Not with armies, but with servers.
Power today doesn’t require shifting borders or moving tanks. It requires rerouting data streams. The soldiers are our phones, the ammunition is our clicks.
In my book I called this the moment when humanity risks becoming “humankindness”—a softened, malleable version of itself, when we surrender the compass of our own judgment to mathematical priesthoods. The question is no longer if it happens, but how we resist.
President Biden once signed a law to keep TikTok out of Chinese control. From today’s vantage point he may wonder whether he merely cleared the path for a more familiar, but no less potent, master of the algorithm.
Seen from above, the world’s borders haven’t shifted. The current beneath them has.
A must read if u don’t know what those ten plagues are..