The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety

Late last year, Valerie Peter, a twenty-three-year-old student in Manchester, England, realized that she had an online-shopping problem. It was more about what she was buying than how much. A fashion trend of fuzzy leg warmers had infiltrated Peter's social-media feeds--her TikTok For You tab, her Instagram Explore page, her Pinterest recommendations. She'd always considered leg warmers "ugly, hideous, ridiculous," she told me recently, and yet soon enough she "somehow magically ended up with a pair of them," which she bought online at the push of a button, on an almost subconscious whim. "They're in the back of my closet," she said.)