Instagram Built the Curated Self. I Already Wrote About It.

In December 2025, Instagram shipped a feature called "Your Algorithm."

It shows you what the platform thinks you are. A tidy list of topics---your interests, your habits, your attention patterns---summarised by AI and presented back to you as identity. You can tweak it. Add topics. Remove topics. Share it to your Story.

Millions of people did exactly that. They posted their algorithmic profiles like horoscopes. Look, the machine knows me. It became a trend. Templates appeared. People made memes of their curated selves and broadcast them to their followers, who were themselves being curated by the same system, in an infinite loop of optimised self-reflection.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri framed it as transparency. Empowerment. You're in control now. You can see the strings, and if you don't like where one goes, you can cut it.

Here's the thing nobody seems to be saying: the puppet doesn't become free because you let it choose which strings to keep.

What Instagram actually did was something far more elegant than surveillance. Surveillance implies you're being watched against your will. This is the opposite. This is being watched with your enthusiastic participation, and then being handed a mirror and told the reflection is a gift.

The feature doesn't give you control over the algorithm. It gives you a role in its optimisation. You are now doing the machine's job for it---sorting yourself into cleaner categories, narrowing your own aperture, filing yourself under approved headings. And you're doing it voluntarily, because it was framed as a choice.

That's not a bug. That's the product.

I wrote a collection of stories called Surfaced that explores exactly this territory. Seven interconnected stories about the quiet tyranny of algorithmic optimisation---and the human cost of lives curated for maximum efficiency.

The stories follow people at different stages of recognition. Some never notice. Some almost wake up. Some choose to see.

When I was writing them, the premise felt speculative. A little paranoid, maybe. The kind of thing that makes for good fiction precisely because it exaggerates a tendency we all sense but can't quite name.

Then Instagram named it. They literally called a feature "Your Algorithm" and people treated their machine-generated identity summary as self-expression. The fiction didn't exaggerate anything. It was just early.

The part that unsettles me most isn't that the algorithm exists. We've known about that for years. It's that when the curtain was pulled back---when users were shown the mechanism that shapes what they see, think about, and care about---the overwhelming response wasn't alarm. It was enthusiasm.

People didn't say: Wait, you've been steering my attention this whole time?

They said: Cool, can I add "cottagecore" to my list?

That's the real story. Not that we're being curated. But that we've reached the point where being curated feels like self-knowledge. Where the algorithm's portrait of you is more legible, more shareable, more you than anything you might have come up with on your own.

The curated self has become the preferred self.

There's a moment in Surfaced where a character encounters the idea that their choices might not be entirely their own. I won't say more than that, because the story earns it in a way a summary can't. But I'll say this: the thing that makes it horror isn't the system. It's the comfort.

The scariest thing about a cage isn't the bars. It's the moment you stop noticing them. Worse: the moment you start decorating them.

Surfaced is available now. If you've ever caught yourself wondering whether the thing you wanted was the thing you chose, it might be for you.