Technology Has Reshaped the Way We Connect

We’ve become so accustomed to niches and narrowcasting that our social lives now follow the same logic. We connect through narrow interfaces — shared interests, curated identities, matching tags — and hesitate to reach beyond them, afraid of being denied access or dismissed as irrelevant.

In doing so, we’ve internalized the algorithmic logic of the platforms that mediate our lives. Algorithms filter and optimize; they predict what we want to see and whom we should meet. Over time, we’ve learned to filter and optimize ourselves in the same way. We curate our personalities, smooth out contradictions, and seek validation inside pre-approved circles.

The result is a new kind of social network — one that is efficient but brittle. We make fewer genuine connections because we’re no longer open to difference or serendipity.

Deleuze and Guattari once described the rhizome as a model of connection where any point can link to any other point — fluid, horizontal, and alive. Our current digital ecosystems resemble the opposite: arborescent, algorithmic structures that sort, predict, and contain. What once was wild and unpredictable has become curated and safe.

In adopting the behavior of our technologies, we’ve moved from living rhizomes to living algorithms. Perhaps the challenge now is to reclaim a bit of that rhizomatic openness — to connect not through sameness, but through surprise.