Some morning soon, before you were fully awake, you reached for a glowing rectangle and pulled downward with your thumb, and a river of other people's lives began to scroll past. Roughly five billion other human beings did something like it the same morning. In less than a single lifetime, we have built a new organ of the species — a global nervous system of feeds and profiles through which much of humanity now experiences friendship, news, politics, grief, and desire. We call it social media, and we have half-forgotten that it is only about twenty years old.
In The Feed, E.B Cohen tells the whole sweep of that improbable story in one gripping volume. It begins not in a Harvard dorm room but with a psychology experiment about how any two strangers might be linked by six handshakes, and with the hobbyists who built the first dial-up bulletin boards in a Chicago blizzard. From there it races through SixDegrees and Friendster and MySpace; through the dorm-room founding of Facebook and the News Feed revolt; through the first YouTube video and the first tweet; through the iPhone, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp; and finally to TikTok and the recommendation engine that replaced the friend with the algorithm.
Beneath the founders' dramas runs the machinery that actually made the feed roar: the Like button, the infinite scroll, the attention economy, the targeted ad. And beneath the glamour run the shadows — Cambridge Analytica, the whistleblower, the misinformation, the fight over young minds. Even-handed, vivid, and unflinching, this is the story of how we built the social web, what it built in us, and where, just possibly, it goes next.
