Oh, yes, I recommend Exit West in the highest possible terms! It's an extraordinary novel, the real cream of the litfic-doing-specfic crop. There's one good and joyful thing to look forward to.

I think one of the strangest things when it comes to "the youth" plus "the internet" is the coincidence -- that happens with all revolutionary technologies -- that there's a generation that has grown up in lockstep with all this. I think that does actually make a difference that can't be reduced to ageist twaddle, in that the new technology becomes a form of identity marker, which makes critique much harder to swallow, because it feels like a criticism of the self.

Probably Ezra and Mohsin (I like the first name references!) could even have been more clear that these algorithms are in fact already incredibly biased, beholden to the prejudices of their makers. There's plenty of data of all kinds of algorithms, social media or facial recognition or anything, emphasizing those biases. So really, if anything, I feel they should have been clearer that this is already happening, and it's happening strictly because algorithms are not independent entities, which even their critics tend to treat them as. They are firmly created, and therefore firmly in the shape of their makers.