The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt

This essay argues that algorithm-driven platforms and surveillance capitalism have ‘hacked’ culture, redirecting social value toward corporate profit while fragmenting shared narratives and shifting power from states to tech monopolies. Tracing a lineage from counterculture and ARPANET to today’s feed economies, it shows how data extraction and hyper-personalization erode civic institutions (news, libraries, main streets, museums) and intensify polarization. Framed as growing socio-technical debt, the authors warn that AI’s hunger for human-generated data accelerates these dynamics, raising urgent questions about regulation, public goods, and the possibility of meaningful resistance.