Published 3/20/26
The Unholy City
Part II
V. Storming the Aggregates
Next to the Nudge Factory, we come to the Aggregation Line, where individual humans are processed as demographic groups, sorted like products on an assembly line. Despite the individualization of our treatment by the City through its various portals, all are run through the same hidden machinery that decides what is to be seen and not seen. The electronic portraits are individual but they are all processed through the Algorithm. For, the City will not deign to deal with individual humans, with all their quirks and needs and varying attention and patience spans. The City deals with all people through a uniform Algorithmic Method, specialized to accommodate only the quantified parameters of a given person and nothing else—ever.
And it all fits like a glove. But the City sees only the glove. It has no category for “person.”
So, it makes sense that, though your individual metrics are of interest at a certain level, a part of the City’s Algorithm is trained to deal with groups, collections of people aggregated according to demographics, like age, sex, race, where one lives, drinking habits, church attendance, content consumed, posts engaged with, and so forth. Included under the heading of demographics are other features that betoken leanings, opinions, biases, and those aspects of people’s character that potentially can be influenced or exploited. From this information, the City can aggregate groups with intersecting demographics, and project the group views and attitudes onto individuals. It does this to a far finer and more reliable degree than was possible in the era of television twenty-five years ago, to address them with their common interests, needs, aspirations, and anxieties. But, like the glove analogy, the City sees only the collective, not a community.
The City’s approach to aggregation is nothing new. We are used to this. The entire economy, polity, and culture now run on aggregated data: elections predicted by polls, insurance priced by risk pools, content served by engagement metrics, public health by population statistics. People are perceived primarily as statistical aggregates. Policy and business are scaled and driven by this understanding of mass phenomena. If not, they are marginal or hobbies.
Your profile belongs to you and only you. But when you push a certain button or watch a certain video, your profile is updated in the same way as for everyone else, to be used later in some curation activity with the same effect, conditioned by the total evaluation of the profile.
The curation and other responses of the Algorithm to your activity are individualized but not individual. They are tailored, but not for you—only for your data. You do not exist to the Algorithm except in so far as you provide inputs. Not even your picture expresses individuality to the Algorithm except in so far as it provides biometric parameters for future recognition.
The City knows persons only as economic quanta. Apart from the parameters of our electronic twins, we are completely exchangeable. What the City does recognize is aggregates realized as collectives. This alone is the source of identity to the City. Through collectives, the City can tailor its responses to suit the demands of its policy priorities.
Here is one of the City’s deepest secrets: the City thrives on conflict. In this age of increased personal isolation, coupled with the 24-hour-a-day news cycle and coverage, competition between identity groups or collectives arises spontaneously. It is then easy for the City to identify groups that stand in opposition to one another and to provide each side with its own echo chamber (its own news feeds, commentary, influencers, videos, and comment threads tailored to its fears and hopes). The City stands above the fray, supporting, inflaming, and reinforcing the arguments for each side, suppressing the countervailing arguments, and reaping the benefits. The result is that more people, moved by anxiety, seek solutions or affirmation from the City’s offerings, which the City copiously provides.
I didn’t see this coming 25 years ago. I thought the City would homogenize us, make us all think alike. Instead, it learned that division is more profitable than uniformity. The evidence is now plain. We see it every day.
The City does not (usually) initiate conflicts, but its structure and operation amplify them and nourish their respective causes—conflict increases engagement, engagement increases data, and the data harvested increases power. This feature has, I think, a deeper purpose: a divided and fractured society is more readily exploited than a united one.
Why dost thou shew me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance? for spoiling and violence are before me: and there are [those] that raise up strife and contention.—Habakkuk 1:3 (AV)
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