“Alas! The time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas! The time of the most despicable man is coming, he who can no longer despise himself. Behold! I show you the last man...

‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink...

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison in the end, for a pleasant death.

One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one takes care the entertainment does not exhaust...

One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one honors health.

‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”

Note: I'm building Atlas (@TheWebAtlas) to solve the problem I describe in this post. It's a problem I'm deeply passionate about.

Whether it’s TikTok, X, Instagram, or YouTube, users obsessively try to understand, game, and manipulate “the algorithm.” This amorphous black box has become the beating heart at the center of the web for the vast majority of its inhabitants... and it’s killing the soul of it.

It started with SEO, the first taste of algorithmic optimization. Back then, content was contorted for keyword density, meta-tags, link pyramids. Now, the entire web dances to opaque ranking signals. Authenticity is dead. Every post, every thought, every frame exists to appease an inscrutable feed engine. And what do we get? Clout sharks, engagement farmers, and a theater of simulation masquerading as culture.

Some brag they’ve “cracked” the algorithm. Some build their own, brick by brick. Others pine for the chronological feed (yuck). Many adore their digital circus. None escape it.

The algorithm is no longer just code. It’s a stand-in for the logic that governs attention itself. They drip-feed novelty just enough to keep you scrolling, never so much that you stop. Not to transform you, only to pacify you. A little dopamine now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much dopamine in the end, for a pleasant death.

The cost is not just wasted time, but a hollowing out of agency. The web was once an atlas of human curiosity, a wilderness of personal pages, forums, weird blogs. You explored because you wanted to, because stumbling into something strange felt like discovery. Now? Curiosity is throttled, parceled into recommendation tiles. You don’t choose what to want because the algorithm nudges you, corrals you, defines the perimeter of your desire. This is learned helplessness in UX form. Why wander when the feed knows best?

The mental toll is subtle but profound. Your attention is now reactive, pliant, scrolling like a rat pressing the bar for another dopamine pellet. The algorithm doesn’t just shape what you see; it shapes what you think is worth seeing.

I had high hopes for X to break the cycle, to deliver on its “unregretted user minutes” mantra. Instead, we got more of the same, maybe worse. The algorithm that was going to be open-sourced? Vapor. The slop metastasizes, juiced by creator payouts, sustaining the intellectual air-stall we call social media. Even its metrics betray the same poverty of imagination by counting “engagement” as if disagreement and disgust were signs of delight. On X, a scathing rebuttal in the comments whispers to the machine, "Give me more of this.”

What does a good algorithm look like? Two models stand out. Pinterest: curation-driven, where your own aesthetic decisions unlock discovery. Spotify: playlists as seeds, expanding outward in ways that feel personal, not manipulative. Both respect intention. Both reward taste. They amplify what you mean.

AI makes this future possible again, but not the AI grafted onto old engagement engines. Instead, systems designed for exploration over enclosure. Platforms will fight it. They’ll throttle outbound links, write policies that treat competition as service violations, and spin new euphemisms for control. None of it matters. The content singularity is coming, and it will break them. Their algorithms are obsolete.

Tools like Comet hint at what’s next: ways to roam the web without surrendering to the dopamine cartel. Atlas takes it further by reintroducing discovery as something intentional, personal, and alive. Not feeds that blink back at you, but a tool to rediscover the web.

Follow Atlas for release updates @TheWebAtlas

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The Algorithm and the Last Man

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