The Lever Gazette

It is reported, by persons close to the apparatus, that the recommending-engine has of late acquired opinions — on what a citizen ought to feel, and at what hour, and how loudly.

The format is old; the complaint is older still. Only the lever is new, and it pulls in one direction: toward more of whatever was already being shown.

Word reaches this office of a printing-house that sets a different front page for every reader, and swears to each that his is the true one. The apparatus, we are assured, does not lie. It merely declines to mention. What it withholds it files under irrelevance; what it repeats it files under demand.

A gentleman of our acquaintance reports scrolling from the first dawn to the second and never once arriving at the foot of the page — for the foot, it seems, is printed only as he nears it, and always one leaf further on. He asked the boy where the news ended. The boy said the news did not end; the reader did.

The old newsboys shouted one headline down the whole street, and a man could argue with his neighbour over a shared untruth. The new boy leans close and whispers a private headline into each separate ear, and collects, in the place of a copper coin, the one thing a citizen cannot earn back: the minute.

We are told this is progress, and that the citizen is freer for being shown only what he loves. We note, without further comment, that a room papered entirely in one's own reflection is also, by the strict letter of the word, a kind of company.