Every single thing we see in our feed is curated for us, it's like a voice whispering in your ear. And that's an ideological power way more sophisticated than the vulgar, Cold War print giants that were ideological vehicles for their megalomaniac owners. This is a system wherein the platform owners don't really care what the ideological content is, all they care is that you are engaged. But that gives a tremendous advantage to any political operator - Jair Bolsonaro, Trump, Farage, the Indian far right - whoever knows how to orchestrate and manipulate these flows of attention.

Writer Richard Seymour examines the online revolution in society, ourselves and the written word - as more of our lives are spent writing and reading online, the invisible algorithms and undemocratic platforms we inhabit create new forms of power and manipulation between ourselves, the machines, and their masters.

Richard is author of the new book The Twittering Machine from The Indigo Press.