Essay: Do we want what the machines tell us we want?

The New Yorker explores algorithmic anxiety, i.e. what interacting online today, while being besieged by system-generated recommendations, means: "Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are".