The tech investor Marc Andreessen once said that in the future, there will be two types of people: “people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It was a prescient prediction, but not in the way Andreessen meant it. He imagined a society in which computer programmers would rule over the analog masses. What’s happening instead is something much less revolutionary: The programmers simply built the machines that let big corporations, powerful politicians and savvy media manipulators tell other people what to do, and they are letting rich people pay to turn those machines off.

—Kevin Roose, in “Online Cesspool Got You Down?”