Why do we like something so much in the digital environment?
Recommendation algorithms and fragmentation of the digital environment
For a long time, we took for granted that, in the digital environment, recommendation algorithms did not decisively alter what we saw, and that when we spoke of that environment, we were speaking, more or less, of the same thing. That we shared a common space, even if we disagreed. That we saw the same things, even if we interpreted them differently. However, the contemporary digital environment is no longer organized as a shared space, but as a network of recommendation systems that filter what appears before each person.
This transformation is not superficial. Much of what we see today is mediated by recommendation algorithms that select content based on our minimal interactions: how long we watch something, what we repeat, what we ignore. Algorithmic personalization not only organizes information; it organizes experience. What appears before us is no longer simply what circulates, but what a system has calculated will best retain our attention.
For a time, the idea that a common debate existed worked. Today, that intuition begins to fail. Not because the words —public opinion, discussion, exchange— have disappeared, but because the digital architecture that sustains our attention no longer distributes a shared experience, but multiple personalized paths that barely touch.
Two people can live in the same city, go through the same events, and share similar cultural references, and yet encounter increasingly different content. Not because the common world has disappeared, but because the daily experience is organized, without noticing it, around recommendations that reinforce what each person already watches, follows, or consumes.
Before, even under rigid frameworks —religions, nations, parties, television— there was a shared cage. It limited and excluded, but it did so collectively and visibly. There was friction between narratives, clashes between visions. The environment might have been narrow, but it was common: what was shared did not guarantee agreement, but it imposed a floor.
Today the cage is no longer social in that sense. It is personal. It does not appear as a single framework within which we all move, but as an environment that silently adjusts to each person. And, from there, the world that appears begins to differentiate itself from the origin. We do not see the same thing and then disagree about its meaning; we see different things from the beginning.
That is why disagreement changes shape. It no longer arises, above all, between opposing positions facing a shared reality, but in the failed crossing between experiences that barely coincide. We do not discuss the same thing from different points of view; we speak from environments that hardly overlap. And when that happens, conflict stops feeling like a difference that can be worked on and begins to be experienced as interference: something that breaks in where it shouldn't and forces us to stop when what the environment has accustomed us to doing is to keep going.
Sense closure and digital attention
Something similar happens with meaning. Not as a deep truth, but as something simpler: the feeling that what appears fits with us. That what we see confirms who we are and how we believe the world works.
Recommendation systems are designed to keep our attention. To do this, they show content similar to that with which we already interact. Over time, what interests us appears more; the rest, less. The daily environment fills with what we already recognize, and the world we see begins to seem coherent, aligned with our preferences.
And here is the decisive point: it is not that we get to know ourselves better. It is that the environment constantly returns the same version of ourselves to us. Repetition creates familiarity, and familiarity generates security. Thus, what was a punctual reaction ends up becoming the principle that organizes what we see.
In this way, the world begins to close without the need for prohibitions. Not because information is lacking, but because recommendations prioritize what already held us. Not because there are no options, but because the same ones return again and again, reinforcing the impression that the world is exactly as we see it. Everything fits. Even what is missing.
The Matrix and the myth of shared illusion
Faced with this sensation, we usually resort to a familiar image. We say that “we live in The Matrix,” as if this coherence were a great collective illusion: a lie imposed from outside, a false world that hides the truth. The comparison is reassuring because it places the problem outside.
But that's where it fails. In Matrix, there is still a common world, even if it is artificial. Everyone sees the same thing and everyone could wake up at the same time. The closure of sense that we experience today works differently: it does not appear as a single lie, but as a different coherence for each person. It does not produce ignorance, but confirmation. And there is no need to hide an exterior: it is enough that, little by little, leaving loses meaning. Not because that world gives us everything we want, but because it explains everything.
The Truman Show and personalized experience
More than to The Matrix, the contemporary problem is much more similar to The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998). Not because we live under surveillance, but because we inhabit individual sets: small, perfectly coherent worlds, organized by recommendation systems and recommendation algorithms that prioritize what best retains our digital attention. This mechanism is not accidental: it is part of an attention economy typical of digital capitalism, where permanence time becomes value.
Truman's world is not spectacular. It does not offer him wealth, or power, or an extraordinary life. It offers him something much more effective: predictability. Truman knows who he is. He knows what to expect from life and what not to. He knows what he wants and why he does not have it. Even his frustration appears accompanied by a clear, assumable reason.
He does not travel because he is afraid of the sea. He does not leave Seahaven because he lost his father. He does not succeed because he is a normal person. Nothing appears as an open wound that forces him to rethink his life; everything is integrated into a chain of reasonable explanations. And here is the most important thing: his world is not designed to make him happy or to punish him; it is designed to confirm him.
Something similar happens with the recommendations that organize what we see on networks, platforms, and feeds. Their goal is not to offer us new perspectives, but to keep our attention. To do this, they select familiar content based on what we have already shown retains us. They can return it to us as aspiration or as frustration; they don't care. The decisive thing is that everything that appears reinforces the idea we already have of who we are and how the world works.
As in Truman's set, nothing should remain loose for too long. If something interests us, it appears more. If something worries us, variations appear. If something retains us, it returns. It is not about everything going well, but about everything being predictable, about nothing forcing a change of coordinates.
Thus, ratification replaces satisfaction. What keeps going is not a search that opens possibilities, but a constant occupation: more similar content, more variations of the same. There is always one more video, one more opinion, one more confirmation. The flow does not stop.
That is why the system does not need to hide anything. There is no need to actively deceive. It is enough for the different to appear less and the familiar to occupy almost all the space. We can complain or celebrate; the mechanism does not need our adherence, only that we stay in.
Dopamine, prediction, and uncertainty reduction
The question then is why all this works so well. And the answer is not, primarily, cultural, but neurobiological.
Our nervous system is not designed to maximize pleasure, but to reduce uncertainty. The brain works as a prediction system: it builds an idea of what the world is like and what place we occupy in it, and anticipates what may happen. When what appears confirms that idea —even if it is not particularly gratifying— the organism can organize itself. When it contradicts it or leaves it in doubt, an alert is activated.
Dopamine, which we usually associate with pleasure, is also more related to prediction than to satisfaction. It is not primarily released when something is pleasant, but when an expectation is met as expected. What hooks us is not so much full enjoyment as the repetition that keeps the circuit active.
That is why what is consolidated is not an intense experience, but a smooth continuity. What attracts is that the next thing resembles the previous one, that nothing forces us to stop, to rethink or to start over.
This individual set, this continuous fit that seems to tell us who we are and how things are, this constant repetition of content that returns to us again and again what we like, what we desire, what we consider correct or important, might seem to work. But the body says something else.
That predictability acts as an immediate relief. It reduces momentary uncertainty. It avoids the effort of stopping, doubting, rethinking. It allows us to continue without interruptions. But precisely for that reason, it does not resolve anything fundamentally. Every small discomfort finds a quick distraction. Every doubt is covered with more content. The tension does not disappear: it is covered by continuity.
The result is not fullness, but continuity without closure. Everything seems to fit. And yet, what accumulates is not satisfaction, but discomfort: fatigue, restlessness, irritation, anxiety, an underlying tension that never really resolves because it is never confronted.
As we get used to environments where almost everything is legible and adjusted to what we already know, our tolerance for what does not fit decreases. Doubt, uncertainty, disagreement, or difference begin to be experienced as interruption. Not only because the environment no longer trains us to sustain them, but because it is organized for the opposite: to offer immediate coherence, quick answers, a new fit every time something is uncomfortable.
It becomes more difficult to remain with an unanswered question. To maintain a conversation without a clear end. To keep listening when something does not match what we expected. To accept that what we think can change or that what we believed to be certain may not be. It also becomes more difficult to show ourselves without that constant coherence: to present ourselves to others not as something stable, but as something open, in process.
Algorithmic personalization and everyday polarization
For a time, the illusion of the individual set can be experienced as a personal solution. A world adjusted to oneself reduces friction, saves energy, allows one to orient oneself. The system seems to fulfill its promise: everything fits, everything is explained, nothing overflows too much.
But, no matter how refined the set is, no matter how much we want to sustain the fiction of that friction-free world, something does not disappear: others. They are always there. And the other, by definition, does not fit entirely. It cannot. It should not. That's where the set will always fail.
A subjectivity trained for years in friction-free environments learns a very specific expectation: that what appears must be legible, coherent, predictable. That answers arrive quickly. That reactions follow a recognizable pattern. That the other returns confirmation, not uncertainty. That expectation, which works in front of a screen of unlimited recommendations, is transferred without mediation to interaction with others.
We then begin to expect from people the same as from the algorithmic environment: that they confirm our image, that they react as appropriate, that they fit into the framework that gives meaning to our experience. Like Truman, we raise our hand expecting traffic to stop. When it doesn't, we do not experience it as difference, but as failure.
When these recommendation systems, increasingly supported by artificial intelligence models, reinforce closed paths, disagreement transforms into polarization. The other then ceases to be someone different and comes to be experienced as a problem. And the initial reaction is usually not rejection, but correction. The other is not expelled: they are explained. They are told how they should think, feel, or react for the bond to work. If you adjust, everything will be fine.
This form of closure is not presented as intolerance, but as reasonableness. But reducing the other to fit —invalidating what they see, correcting their sensitivity, simplifying their position— can only work under an impossible condition: that they stop being who they are.
Conflict becomes even more difficult when the other, in turn, inhabits their own set. When they also believe they know who they are, what they want, and how things should be. At that point, there is no possible adjustment. There is a clash. The encounter ceases to be a shared space and becomes a silent dispute between forms of the world. Each one experiences themselves as the one who makes sense, who sees clearly, who is right.
A logic of winners and losers then sets in: who has to adapt, who must give in. The bond stops opening and begins to close. And when that closure fails —and it always fails— aggression appears, often symbolic: ridicule, labeling, reducing the other to a caricature, discrediting them in a phrase. It does not seek to understand or convince; it seeks to restore coherence. To feel again that the world fits.
And when even that is not enough, withdrawal comes. Cutting off the conversation. Blocking. Stepping aside. Returning to an environment where nothing is uncomfortable and everything confirms. The more difficult it becomes to inhabit a shared world, the more we feel the need to take refuge in a space that returns a stable image of ourselves to us. But that withdrawal does not solve the problem: it trains it. It makes the other even less tolerable next time.
Leaving the set: uncertainty versus ratification
Thus, what began as a supposed personal solution ends up producing a collective effect: the increasing impossibility of living with others. Not because the shared world has disappeared, but because what is shared ceases to organize and remains as background noise against each person's set.
That is the decisive point. The set does not fail because it does not work, but because it works too well. Because it explains everything. Because it leaves no cracks. Because it demands nothing but fitting in. And living like that —sooner or later— ceases to be enough. Not because a luminous truth appears, but because a completely ratified life begins to dangerously resemble another's life.
No human being can live indefinitely to sustain the meaning of others. No human being can indefinitely demand that others sustain theirs. Shared experience cannot be reduced to a staging. The other is not an element of the set. Never was.
Truman —true-man— is the perfect subject of the set. He knows who he is, what he wants, and what place he occupies. He does not doubt. He does not overflow. He does not introduce noise. He functions exactly as he should. On the set, each person is part of the set and lives to sustain his world. In real life, unknowingly, Truman lives to sustain the world of millions who watch him.
Truman works for everyone. And yet, he fails at a decisive point: himself.
Truman does not leave because he knows what is outside. He leaves his set because there is nothing left to discover inside. Because a world that explains everything is a world that closes everything off. Truman understands that when everything is decided beforehand —when he will no longer encounter anything or anyone unforeseen, and when no one will be able to see him beyond what they already expect of him— all that remains is repetition.
A repetition without risk, without surprise, without the possibility of changing or being changed. A world where everything fits, but nothing truly happens.