Small piece on a large topic: Are algorithms fracturing our once-unified culture, leaving us in an archipelago of incommensurabilities, or are they ruthlessly feeding our already-diverse expectations, thereby reinforcing a polytheism of insular homogeneous niches?  A useful lexicon for thinking about our worries, and some good lines, like this one:

We thought the long tail of the internet would bring diversity; instead we got sameness and the perpetuation of the oldest biases, like gender discrimination. The best indicator of what gets recommended is what’s already popular, according to the investor Matthew Ball, a former head of strategy at Amazon Studios. “Netflix isn’t really trying to pick individual items from obscurity and get you to watch it,” Ball said. “The feedback mechanisms are reiterating a certain homogeneity of consumption.”

This makes me think that there's something to Arendt's argument that in the twentieth century we saw the distinction between public and private effaced, and the idea of "the social" emerging to encompass them both.  Arendt's idea has been attacked by many people--famously by Stephen Holmes as "polis envy," which tells you more about him than about her thought--and I allow that there's a bit of nostalgia in her German declinism.  But I also think that there's something really interesting in the idea of distinguishing between public and private, in the service of creating a truly pluralistic public space; maybe the one kind of distinction allows for other kinds of divisions to be overcome.  That would push Arendt in the direction of the kind of "liberalism" I like, the liberalism of Trilling and Niebuhr and Ellison, what Amanda Anderson calls Bleak Liberalism.  I like it.  Anyway, just a perhaps over-gnomic thought for Saturday morning.