“I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency—love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes.” — Edward Luttwak

“I almost prefer museums to the art, and the art I do like explores the feeling of the body in space, the relations between body, space, form, architecture. This is part of why I like community work spaces so much: full of people, tools, and physical constructions getting reconfigured over time.”

Much as TikTok's algorithm, through the content it selects, begins to posit a self for user to become and relate to or consume as a fantasy about who they seem to be, so would Spotify's recommendation system. In other words, recommendation systems in general don't "recommend" so much as try to reformat the self so that it can power the underlying algorithms and produce structured data for ad-targeting.

“Cities are no more artificial than Bee-hives. The internet is as natural as a spider’s web. We ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival — we are part of an intricate network that comes from the original takeover of the Earth. Our power and intelligence do not belong specifically to us, but to all life.”

— John Gray, Straw Dogs