We seem to have reached a point in this world where convenience has replaced curiosity. When platforms know us so well that they only show us variations of what we already like, we stop encountering anything that challenges or surprises us.
The comfort of predictability comes at the cost of growth.
More and more noise is being fed into the internet every day, and the promise of algorithms being the solution for discerning through all that noise feels long gone.
The real issue isn’t even the consumption of content, it’s that creators are now making work specifically designed to perform well within algorithmic systems.
Art gets simplified because complex work doesn’t photograph well for social media. Writing gets shortened because long-form doesn’t get as many clicks. Music gets structured around hooks in the first few seconds because that’s what the platforms reward.
The result is that everyone starts chasing the same metrics, following the same formulas, creating variations of what’s already proven to work for machines, not people.
Frequency started mattering more than depth. Creators found that putting out more content than others gave them more opportunities for their work to be found online, and the ones that created less often were quickly forgotten.
So it became imperative to create content often, even if it was less meaningful or relevant, to keep up with the machine.
Post regularly or lose momentum. Stay visible or become irrelevant. Keep producing content or the platform moves on without you.
I don’t know about you but this doesn’t feel sustainable, and it doesn’t seem like it leads to better work.
Everything you create now has a countdown, and it’s easier to say it’s “good enough” than do exactly what you want.
Deep work takes time. Mastery requires focus. Creating something truly meaningful demands sustained attention over months or years. But algorithmic culture demands the opposite: constant output, immediate results, measurable engagement.
This creates an impossible tension. To build an audience, you need to produce content constantly. But to do the work worth having an audience for, you need uninterrupted time away from that constant production.
Here’s the craziest part: the more content gets optimized for algorithms, the more we expect all content to work that way. Our attention spans shrink. Our tolerance for slowness decreases. Our ability to sit with discomfort or complexity atrophies.
A recent research from MIT’s Media Lab revealed that when we rely on AI tools like ChatGPT, our brain engagement drops significantly, particularly in areas tied to creativity and memory, and over time we become more dependent on these tools.
This is what researchers call “cognitive debt.” We’re not just outsourcing tasks to algorithms and AI. We’re actually weakening our capacity to think deeply, create originally, and engage fully with ideas.
This isn’t just about AI writing tools. It’s about every algorithm-driven system we’ve become dependent on. When platforms think for us, recommend for us, curate for us, we seem to lose the mental muscles required to do those things ourselves.
It’s a feedback loop of doom: as we create shorter and less meaningful content, it trains audiences to expect that, which pressures creators to make even shorter content, while algorithms get tweaked to only reward what’s working. It’s a race to the bottom where everyone loses the capacity for depth.
In all of this, we lose the most important things like the ability to make work for its own sake. The freedom to give an idea the time it needs. The space to experiment and fail.
We lose the capacity to discover what we didn’t know we were looking for. We lose the joy of creating without measurement. We lose the connection that comes from genuine human curation rather than algorithmic sorting.
And that’s what we realized we needed to change for the magazine, because we fell trap to this algorithm culture as well. We were following numbers, not people.
We created based on what was working, not what we wanted to make work.
So we want to follow our discoveries, and create with joy. To come up with ideas and give them the time they deserve to be the best local content they could be.
We want to personally curate every story, become an alternative to algorithms. We want our audience and ourselves to find stories the machines would never look at, we want to be surprised by what we discover.
Now that we understand what’s broken, we can build something different.
We’ll reveal what we’re building instead in the next issue.
