Catalog Essay for The Feed
You experience your feed as "the news." It feels like "the world." It is actually a highly specific slice, constructed to maximize your engagement.
The violence isn't that you're in a bubble. The violence is that you can't see what you're not being shown. You can't evaluate what you never encountered. The structure itself is invisible—and that invisibility is the mechanism of control.
Research has documented that media ecosystems form distinct clusters. Right-wing media forms a dense, insular cluster. Center-to-left media forms a looser, more interconnected network. These clusters don't just reflect different political views—they operate as fundamentally different information environments.
People in different clusters see different events, different framings, different facts. The same event—January 6th, the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID origins—becomes completely different stories depending on which ecosystem you inhabit.
This isn't just about politics. Information bubbles exist for health information, consumer products, entertainment, finance, and culture. Each domain has its own topology, its own clusters, its own paths between them.
Most people don't actively seek news. They encounter it incidentally through social media, conversations, and algorithmic feeds. Their information diet is determined by what algorithms show them, not what they choose.
This passive consumption pattern creates distinct information environments. People who claim not to follow news still have information diets—they're just shaped by incidental exposure rather than active selection. The algorithm learns what you engage with and shows you more of it. You don't actively choose your bubble—it forms around your passive engagement patterns.
The Feed visualizes the entire information topology as a network. Nodes are media sources, influencers, platforms. Edges connect sources that share audiences. Clusters emerge naturally from consumption patterns.
When you answer questions, a point appears on the map—your location in the network. You can see which cluster you're in, which clusters are adjacent, which are distant, and the paths between them.
The power isn't in telling you you're trapped. It's in showing you the entire topology. Here's the shape of the information landscape, and here's where you're standing in it.
The piece shows specific events where different ecosystems saw radically different information. January 6th was an insurrection in one ecosystem, a mostly peaceful protest in another. The Hunter Biden laptop was a major story in one ecosystem, dismissed as disinformation in another. COVID origins were debated differently across ecosystems, with the Overton window shifting at different rates.
These aren't just different opinions. They're different information realities. People in different media diets have fundamentally different "facts" about the same events.
The most powerful part is what you never saw. Stories that were major news in distant clusters but never reached yours. The violence of the feed isn't just distortion—it's omission. You can't evaluate what you never encountered.
The piece shows you these absences. These are stories that were major news in that cluster but never reached your cluster. Here are the headlines, the framings, the information that existed in parallel to what you saw.
The Feed doesn't claim to see your actual feed history. It uses documented research on media ecosystem clustering to infer your likely position from proxy signals. We're showing statistical patterns, not certainties.
The piece works not because it's perfectly accurate, but because it reveals that the topology exists. Even showing visitors where they might be, and showing what the other positions look like, achieves the goal: making visible the invisible structure of algorithmic curation.
The Feed is part of The Prior, a collection of three pieces examining how algorithmic systems shape us. The Forecast examines prediction as colonization. The Injection traces belief to its source. The Feed maps attention as extraction.
Together, these three pieces form a portrait: prediction colonizes the future, injection installs the present, and the feed captures attention. The installation is the collection itself—three pieces, three domains, one system.
The goal is not to tell you that you're wrong, or that you're being manipulated. The goal is to make the pipes visible. To show the infrastructure that precedes choice, the machinery that makes some futures available and others impossible, some information visible and other information invisible.
You are here. You could only ever be somewhere. The question isn't how to escape your position—it's whether you knew you had one.