“We are troubled not by spirits but by bots and opaque algorithmic processes, which alternately and capriciously curse or bless us. In the Digital City, individuals may be refused credit, passed over for job interviews, or denied welfare on the basis of systems built on digital data against which they have little to no recourse.”
This quote is from the article The Analog City and the Digital City published in the Winter 2020 issue of The New Atlantis.
I can attest to the truth of this assessment. I applied for many jobs last Fall via the online portals touted as avenues to employment by the Digital City. I always had the feeling that I was not offering up the correct sacrifice to the GADs (gatekeeping algorithmic directives) and, so, the oracles never responded to me. Or rather they responded with a generically generated email telling me that my resume had been reviewed and the company was going in a different direction. I finally decided to bypass the GADs by sending a physical letter to a physical address in the hopes that a physical pair of eyes would read it. And it worked.