What Nobody Chose

Almost everything you know about yourself arrived by accident.

A man you dislike says eight true words in a meeting, on his way to making a different point, and you spend four years unable to put them down. You get on the wrong bus and walk back through a street you had lived twenty minutes from for three years. A woman rings the wrong number about a dog, and after nine minutes you notice you have not spoken to another person since Sunday.

Nobody picked any of them. That is what made them useful. You find out where you are standing by what hits you - and nothing aimed at you on purpose can tell you that.

Something now sits between you and the week. It is good at it, it is not lying to you, and it is selecting. The remark that would have landed does not arrive. The question you would have sat with is answered before you have finished asking it. The thing you would have found in the fourth result is on the first.

If something else chooses what reaches you, how would you ever find out where you are standing?

This is not a book about misinformation, or elections, or whether the machines are dangerous. It is about one person finding out what they are made of, and about the instrument they used to do it.

It does not pretend selection is new. Attention selects. Mood selects. Where you were born selects, and so do family, language, school and whatever happened to you at nine. The argument is about what is different now, and it is made so that a reader can disagree with it precisely.

And it does not end with a programme. There is nothing to install, nothing to give up, and no ten-year plan that would work. What is left at the end is smaller than you were hoping for and is the only thing in the book that has not been handed over: you still flinch. Something still arrives, something still answers, and the answering was not supplied by anybody.

Thirteen short chapters. About an hour and a half.