Many, including me, have cited parallels between Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and the internet. As with blogs and Facebook posts, the printing press meant written thought and communication, and its wide distribution, was no longer the exclusive province of an anointed clergy. The voiceless gained a voice, sparking the violent and centuries-long turmoil of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Thirty Years’ War, the sort of existential fractures we seem to be teetering on the verge of ourselves.

But how did 17th- and 18th-century Europeans manage to muddle through such disruptive change? How did something so potentially dangerous give birth to the Enlightenment and all its trappings of democracy and human rights? That required a centuries-long elaboration of norms around editorship, the protocols of scholarly and journalistic truth, and a publishing industry of gatekeepers. The New York Times and HarperCollins (and dare we say WIRED) of our day are the contemporary remnants of that coping mechanism.

Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Before turning to writing he headed Facebook's early ad-targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller.

When it comes to the internet, the technologists’ response is very different: They collectively swear by the algorithm, fancy talk for a recipe of logical steps and maybe some math. Our brains can’t parse the jumble of content—part art, part trash—our friends generate on Facebook or the wider web, so an algorithm sorts it for us. Mark Zuckerberg, or really, his News Feed algorithm, is now editor-in-chief of the world’s content (for better or worse).

For a consumer, the difference between Gutenbergian editorial curation and Facebook’s algorithm is that between idealistic prescription and amoral prediction. An editor tells you to eat your vegetables and presents you with an expansive piece on the convoluted political and ethnic logic of the Yemen war. That piece will also be (relatively) balanced---within the self-awareness envelope of the media outlet---and probably fact-checked for objective truths like names, places and quotes.

Conversely, the algorithm will deliver as much sugar and fat as you like, offering up daily doses of french fries like Kim Kardashian’s posterior and the latest contretemps in the Trump telenovela, plus whatever viral, unsubstantiated BS emerged from the internet ooze that day.

In many ways, we are rushing forward to the past. To understand why, consider life before books and mass literacy. There was no notion of “looking something up”—the only knowledge resided in collective memory, or maybe in the head of an elder or shaman. There was no recorded, linear timeline of events beyond nature's cycles of seasons or lunar phases; society lived in an eternal present. Mediated experience was a swirl of word-of-mouth ephemera and tribal mythology that persisted through unfaithful oral repetition. This was every human’s world until a few centuries ago, nothing on an evolutionary timescale.

How does our brave, new smartphone world compare?

What we politely call “fake news”---a formulation that presupposes some antecedent credible truth called “news” that we're now abandoning---is just the tribal folklore of a certain (and usually opposing) tribe. Our exhausting and constant absorption in a transitory but completely overwhelming media cycle is our own preliterate eternal present. Who thinks now of Cecil the Lion and the villainous dentist who shot him, whose practice was promptly ruined by an online mob? We’re too busy dealing with the third huge Trump scandal this week, which we’ll forget in due course thanks to next week’s school shooting. Could any of us, if pressed, even construct a chronological ordering of Trump media cycles, or would we have only episodic memories of highlights, as we do when trying to reconstruct some long-ago period of life from memory? Twitter’s Moments product is a constant stream of just such transitory and disordered reactions to context-free events. A history-less forgetfulness is the overarching product vision for Snapchat, whose posts—atomized and textless morsels of personal experience—are designed to disappear and never be consulted or searched.

Future historians will be no help in making sense of our era. There’ll be no authoritative history that more than one faction will trust; a dozen factions will each have their own history. Given the persistence and ubiquity of digital media, it will be the best-documented period in American history, but nobody will agree on what happened.