Here is what puzzled me. We have never had more individual data and naive intuition says all that granular personal data should fragment us, splinter the world into a billion niches. And yet the opposite is happening. The more the machines learn about us as individuals, the more alike our worlds look. That paradox … is what this piece is about..

This paradox makes sense to me. In basic statistics, the larger the sample size, the better the result. If we have larger access to everything, the expectation for human behaviour — including sentiment and preference — is clearer.

What we have now is closer and closer to Plato’s Chair than we have ever been. Why does every coffee shop look the same? Why does every vacation home have the same cabinets? Why are there less cars for sale in the color yellow? Because those are what the ideals are. And now we have evidence.