June 2014. The world learned that Facebook, in partnership with Cornell and UCSF, had quietly run a psychological experiment on 689,003 users. For one week in January 2012, some saw a feed weighted toward the positive; others toward the negative. The goal, published in PNAS: measure whether emotional states could be transferred between strangers through algorithmic curation alone.
The answer was a resounding, terrifying yes. The study was filed away as an ethics scandal — but that was the small story. The larger one was that coordination between algorithms, psychology, and network dynamics had produced an emergent behaviour none of the elements could produce alone. Intelligence didn’t live in the humans. It didn’t live in the machines. It had emerged, un-asked-for, in the space between them. That space is what this book is about.